


Myth Taken

by wolf_shadoe



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, Goats
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-16
Updated: 2019-06-21
Packaged: 2020-05-13 05:36:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 23,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19244887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wolf_shadoe/pseuds/wolf_shadoe
Summary: In a comfortable Californian town in the year 2110, Benji meets his new neighbours and discovers a strange tale of family history that skews the lines between fact and fiction.





	1. The Emptiness of White Pages

 

 

 

He'd moved up here to write, or that was what he'd told everyone. Spun some line about the neighbourhood being too busy, too loud for his typewriter to compete with; in reality, it was just too close to memories of  _ her. _

Lily still came on the weekends, of course, filling his home with the slapping of her little bare feet on wooden floors as she scampered about and chased rainbows. Saturday, Sunday, they'd bake cookies and plant seeds; five weekdays he'd sit and stare at his empty pages, wondering how they could still be too full of  _ her _ when she were now more than four miles away. Then Friday afternoon would come again and he'd close the door on the study to collect Lily from school, letting himself forget those pages waiting to be filled until she went away again. 

He'd bought this place in his mind the moment he saw it; an old-fashioned and ramshackle wooden thing of two stories, surrounded by a garden of herbs and espaliered fruit trees against a red brick wall. Beyond the back fence was grass until it gave way to desert; next door was the last house on the street - the last house in Sunnyvale - mostly screened from his view by large trees. He had yet to glimpse any occupants, but most nights he caught the glow of yellow light from the windows. Their goats he  _ had _ seen, a smallish herd that browsed their way about the several acres surrounding the house; sometimes they would lie in the sun near his own fence, where he liked to observe them and their many-coloured coats.

Perhaps he would write about goats. An ironic romance novel with a miserable ending, populated by goats. The goats never looked miserable though; indeed, they carried a certain contented elegance when not at play. And his publisher did not want a book about romantic goats. He wanted another feel-good bestseller with a  _ happy _ ending, which Benji could not produce. 

His book - his  _ first _ book, as he kept being corrected - was still selling in fantastical numbers; the pantry would not find itself in competition with the empty white pages during his lifetime, if he were careful. But the weight of expectations, of calls from his agent and letters from readers, of bookstore requests and short story collators, those brought feelings of inadequacy. The readers were the worst; they all wanted to know,  _ what happened next? Did Tess and Danny have more children? Get a dog?  _ He was careful not to open his email when he'd had a drink, in case he blurted it out onto the keyboard:  _ everything went horribly, horrifically, horrendously wrong.  _

  
  


There was a photography exhibition at the small gallery next to the supermarket:  _ One Hundred Years of Sunnyvale. _ One hundred photos of the town landscape, blown up to A2 size and displayed in chronological order, from the renaming celebration of 2010 until the current day, 2110. Procrastinating over his empty pages again, he told himself it was essential research and wandered in. 

The earliest photos showed rubble-scattered pools of water around the central suburbs, before they'd been turned into the duck ponds and parks of today; the hills and slopes around the edges of the town - where his house now stood - were bare of anything but grass, only six years risen from the earth. Although, not technically risen; it was the town inside them that had dropped. They'd covered it briefly in local history at school, the series of small earthquakes that had dropped the entire town in stages until it rested ninety feet below the desert plains. Most of the architecture had survived the shift, as could be seen here; bar the wet areas and several fenced-off piles of collapsed masonry, the twentieth-century houses and businesses looked both occupied and well kept. Some of them he recognised, still standing today in the older parts of town; most had been replaced over the years, the influx of new citizens over the first two decades of  _ Sunnyvale  _ bulldozing them to build larger, flasher, more modern. Land had been inexpensive and the town had grown rapidly, new subdivisions, streets, malls, springing up everywhere over the next half of the photos until the town basin looked much as he now knew it, home to eighty thousand people. His own house had popped up in 2014, along with those on either side; someone's attempt at an upper-class hill suburb, looking down on the town, before they'd realised the steep slope up to plains-level was too much of a daily hassle for the elite. And no one really cared about that stuff anymore anyway. 

None of this inspired him. There was something in the earliest pictures perhaps, a hint of stories amongst the rubble, but they were fallen and washed away so that only the faintest whiff remained. And they were not feel-good bestsellers, in any case. He did his shopping and went home. 

That night he dreamed of the quakes; of people holding onto bannisters as houses dropped like elevators and water gushed up from drains. There hadn't actually been people here at the time, he knew, and for the first time, he wondered why not; how had they known to evacuate? This, then, was a story unknown. Probably a dry and disappointing one, but he would dig it out all the same. Perhaps he would write an article for the Historical Society… It was all procrastination, postponation, deferration; it was better than silent keys.

He visited the library, the aforementioned Historical Society, bought a book on Twentieth Century California and one on The Geological Upheavals of 2004. They told him little of interest - there had been warning rumbles, growing daily. The people had left alone and in small groups, evacuating without orders, seeming to act under some primal instinct of oncoming danger that spread through the population herd-like and subconsciously. Here, Cleveland, Anchorage. 

He titled his page  _ The Evacuation of Sunnydale,  _ centred and underlined. Twenty-four characters; twenty-seven including spaces. A few more and he'd have one for each day he'd lived here. Enough for a coffee break.

The character - and then word - count grew slowly, his love of fiction soon twisting the article format into a first-person narrative account by an invented narrator, and then spiralling off into an imagined tale of everyday life. It was probably wildly inaccurate, but it was words at last, and so he continued. 

After four pages he looked back and realised the whole thing felt false; a bland and depressing lie of someone else’s impossibly mundane life. He shoved it in a drawer, and returned to staring at empty pages until school broke for the term and Lily came to stay for two long weeks.

  
  


It was Lily who first spotted a neighbour, of course, her busy little eyes always probing and seeking and asking of the world. Pottering about in the garden as she did in the evenings while he cooked dinner, she'd taken to feeding the goats over the fence, offering samples of every herb in the garden before narrowing down their favourites. She gave the creatures names - Ruepunzellastar, Mint-cakes, Princess Rosebud - and one evening came barreling inside with the news that Ruepunzellastar was going to have a  _ baby! _

"Is she now?" Benji asked as he carried their plates to the table. 

"Yes. The man said so."

This gave him pause; it did not sound like part of her usual tale-spinning, and the idea of a strange man talking to his little girl was unsettling. Probably all those old horror stories he read. "What man would this be?" he asked. 

"The man next door. When the goats usually go away they were still there, and he came looking for them. He told me they were waiting for Ruepunzellastar, because she was too tired to walk. I told him what her name was." 

"Of course you did." Their mysterious neighbour then.

"And he said she was tired because her baby was very heavy, and soon it would come out. I didn't know she was going to have a  _ baby! _ Do you think it will have the same patterns as her? She has the sweetest little speckle of white on her shoulder."

"I guess we'll have to wait and see. And what does our neighbour look like?"

She shrugged. "A man."

He snorted. No doubt that was all she'd taken in.

  
  
  


*

 

Ruepunzellastar was not with the rest of the goats the next evening, though she waited until they wandered away as the sun set. She was not there the next morning, either, or any of the times Lily spied the herd browsing through the trees beyond the fence that day. At dusk her father got on the telephone while he was cooked dinner, and, seeing her chance, she scrabbled over the fence and went to look for her, following the rest of the herd towards the house. 

The man was waiting there with a bucket, and if he was surprised to see her trailing behind the goats, he did not show it. He looked at her while the goats milled around and sniffed at the bucket, and she looked at him. She tried to pay attention to what he looked like, so she could tell Dad; she was a secret agent, infiltrating the neighbouring country to gather intelligence. He had brownish hair, and in his bucket was some stuff that looked like muesli. 

"I was looking for Ruepunzellastar," she said eventually. 

He smiled a little, then pointed to a small building on the back of the house. "She's inside. She hasn't had her baby yet."

Lily nodded, then turned and ran. 

  
  


The next day they went to the beach, so she forgot all about Ruepunzellastar. But the day after that she remembered, and the goat still did not appear. After lunch Dad picked up a book and sat on the couch, so she tiptoed outside and then ran for next door. 

The goats were off in the trees, so she arrived in the yard alone, and found it empty. She hesitated, looking between the little building and the back door of the house. She was just thinking about trying to look in the window of the building when the door of the house opened, and a woman stood there. 

"Hello," the woman said. 

"Hello." The woman smiled, like the man had, but didn't say anything. "The man said I could come and see Ruepunzellastar." It wasn’t really a lie; he hadn't said she couldn't. 

The woman smiled more then, and looked like maybe she would laugh. "Do you know how to be quiet? We don't want to frighten her."

Lily nodded solemnly. 

"Okay. Go over to the barn, and I'll go around and let you in." She closed the door. 

Lily walked slowly over to the building - barn - and stood back from the doors. She looked back over her shoulder towards home; she should have asked Dad to come with her and do the talking. But he might have said no. He probably would have said no if he knew she was coming on her own. She should go back, while no one was looking. 

Just then, a noise came from inside the barn; a short crying sound like a baby makes. Lily hurried up to the door. The door opened from inside, and the woman was there. She held her finger to her lips, then motioned Lily inside and pointed to a stall. 

In the stall stood Ruepunzellastar, with-- "Two!" she said, then clapped her hands over her mouth and looked at the woman nervously. The woman nodded, smiling, and Lily relaxed again and looked back at the babies. They were fuzzy and wobbly-looking, with funny long legs. 

"They were born this morning," the woman whispered. "The brown one is a girl, and the black and white one is a boy." Lily nodded sagely to show that she knew all about goats. "We'd better leave them to rest," the woman said after a little longer, and moved back towards the door. 

Lily took one last look at Ruepunzellastar, then walked outside. "Thank you," she said, looking back when the woman stayed inside. She was proud to have remembered; she must sound very mature.

"You're welcome. Ask your dad first next time, okay?" 

Lily felt her cheeks grow hot, and nodded quickly before bolting for home.

  
  


*

 

Lily scampered inside and bounced around, restless with excitement and suspiciously closed-lipped. He pretended to be engrossed in his book, and five minutes later she spat it out: "Ruepunzellastar had her babies!"

"Babies, is it?"

"Yes! She had two. One is a girl, and one is a boy."

"And how did we find this out?" 

Lily blushed and picked at her shirt. She was such an endearingly terrible liar. "I asked the woman if I could go and see her," she mumbled. 

So there was a woman next door too. That was reassuring, somehow, if his errant offspring was determined to keep poking her nose after the goats. "And did you see her?"

"Yes! They're in the barn. They were just born this morning."

Right. They would definitely have to have a discussion about going into stranger's barns. "What was the woman like?"

Lily's eyebrows came down into a frown as she thought hard. "She had brownish-yellowish hair… and her t-shirt had a cat on it." 

Observation skills improving? More likely she'd just admired the shirt. "How old was she?" More frowning. "Did she look like a grandma?"

"No. She looked like… Christie's sister."

Christie from her class at school, this must be. He hadn’t met her, or her sister. "How old is Christie's sister?"

"Twenty. She just had her birthday. She got a passenger car."

Hmm. Not the man's mother, then. Sister? Wife? Daughter? What did they do? Hell, now it was spawning a series of questions that would niggle at him until he had answers for them, whether by finding them out or inventing his own. 

"She said I had to ask you before I go over again," Lily mumbled. 

"So you should," he said, and launched into a discussion on staying in the yard.

  
  


From his top-floor bedroom that night, he saw lit windows on the same level next door, and the own-invented answers began to flow. Secret agents. Escaped convicts. Ghosts. Vampires. Night shift workers? (Of course not). Royalty in hiding. An eloped princess. Valjean and Cosette. Illuminati. Something flashed between the source of the light and the window; he added aliens to the list. 

After dropping Lily at school the next morning he had a quiet cup of coffee on his own, fleshing out the alien royalty explanation. Then he walked down his driveway and up theirs, hoping he wasn't waking his night shift worker neighbours. With that in mind, he kept his knock soft. 

He was just about to leave, maybe try again this evening, when he heard the handle turn, and the door swung open. The man standing back inside it might have been anywhere around his thirties, Benji's guesstimate being pulled downwards by the man's smooth skin and pushed upwards by the shadows carried in his eyes. There was something both wary and powerful about him, like one of those lean and muscled junkyard dogs that knew just when to strike. He wore a plain dark t-shirt and jeans; his bare feet hinted that perhaps he had been summoned from bed after all. 

Benji realised he'd been standing silent too long; before he could say something to rectify it, the man relaxed his posture slightly and said with an odd accent, "You must be Lily's dad."

"Yes. Yes, I, uh, live next door." He pointed stupidly; this house only had the one next door. "Benji Oats," he said more firmly, extending his hand. The man took it slowly, giving it a tiny squeeze before dropping it again; his hand felt soft and warm. Benji really hoped a name would be forthcoming; couldn’t go on calling him  _ the man  _ in his head.

"William. Guess that makes us neighbours.” Again the odd accent; British, but not quite right. Maybe he’d grown up in some isolated backwater with its own unique peculiarities of pronunciation. 

A young woman stepped into view beside him, and thrust out her own hand as she asked, “ _ The  _ Benji Oats? The author?” Her voice was much less accented, though still not local. 

He shrugged as he took her hand, unsure how to answer that question lately. “I suppose.”

“I loved your book,” she said. She smiled in a way that seemed genuine, but her eyes held the same haunting shadows as her companion's and something about the way she stood hinted at a similar hard-won strength, for all her small size. 

“My wife,” said William, his hand going to her back, “Buffy." Both of them smiled then, unconsciously and privately, and suddenly they looked so young and happy that it hurt.

"Nice to meet you both," he said quickly, moving on. Maybe they didn't have last names; he'd heard it was a trend lately. "I wanted to apologise for my daughter; she shouldn't have been on your property without permission. Yours and mine."

"It’s fine," Buffy said. "I did tell her she needed to ask you next time."

"Yes, she said, once she'd fessed up about being over here," he said with an apologetic grin. 

Buffy stepped back from the doorway, and William angled with her in clear invitation. "Would you like a coffee?" she asked.

"That would be lovely," he said, and stepped inside.

  
  
  



	2. Hesitation and Curiosity

 

 

 

He was led through a dimly curtained living room lined with bookshelves holding actual paperbooks, tempting him to slow his feet to inspect the selection, then on to a large kitchen facing the back yard, cool and shadowy beneath the tall evergreens. William moved to the bench and Buffy waived Benji to a small kitchen table, taking a seat herself. 

Benji sat down, and Buffy immediately stood up again, saying, "Could you-- would it be rude to ask you to sign my book? I'm sure you're probably sick of people asking that."

He smiled and gestured his willingness with hands and head; this, at least, was a familiar social interaction. "Of course."

She ducked back into the living room, returning a moment later with a copy of his book and a pen. He signed it to them both, and she smiled happily again, the warmth of it coming through her somewhat anxious demeanour. Both of them had this kind of hesitancy to their movements, as if struggling to remember a script; they seemed like people very unused to interacting with outsiders, yet determined to seem friendly and normal. There was a story here, he was certain, though it must be a dark one. 

The kettle boiled and William offered him milk and sugar; he declined, taking his coffee black and bitter, a self-punishing habit he'd picked up since his life went the same way. He took the opportunity to ask after the mother goat (and apologise for the odd name he knew her by); they laughed a little, and said the name was perfect - they'd replaced 'Speckle' with it. 

Conversation branched out tentatively. He told them how long he'd been next door, that he'd lived down in town before that, had been born here thirty-two years ago. He suspected they knew all this already, between their own observations and the author bio on his book, but they seemed pleased for the ritualised exchange of facts. If they wondered about the wife mentioned on the back of his book, they didn't ask. They'd been in this house five years, she told him, had moved to town shortly before they were married. She seemed to check in with William before each statement, but what could have been misconstrued as behaviour born of a controlling relationship appeared to be more about seeking reassurance over a potential threat from Benji. Perhaps she had some kind of mental health problem, some trauma-induced fear of the world at large, and this was why he never saw them go anywhere. William, for his part, gave less away; he seemed more practised in playing a role, and content to watch while she talked. Somewhere in the back of his brain, these details were being scribbled on character sheets, possibilities pencilled in with question marks. 

He considered asking where they had come from, but suspected that might shut down the stilted conversation. "Why Sunnyvale?" he asked instead. 

"My grandmother lived here as a child, with her sister," she said easily, without checking in. "She was very fond of the place, and the stories trickled down. William had ancestors from here too, so it seemed like the logical choice. We work online, so location is irrelevant."

"It's a lovely place," he replied, telling his own scripted lies. Although, his problems were hardly the town's fault; he'd thought it lovely before. "When did your grandmother live here?" he asked, thinking of pooled water and the expanding town.

"When it was Sunnydale," she said, with a hint of wistfulness. He could relate; it was easy to long for the unobtainable painted in the golden hues of another's recollection. "When it was still flat," she added, and his ears shot up.

"Oh? I've been attempting to research what it was like here then. And around the evacuation."

Shadows seemed to drain the life from her golden hair and perky quickness as she became very still, eyes losing focus to stare at something only she saw. He wanted to pull the words back, rewind, regretting whatever unknown trigger he'd bumbled onto.

"For your writing?" William asked smoothly, drawing his attention. The man's hand moved under the table, as if reaching for hers, while his eyes seemed to lock Benji in place and freeze any mention of apology for his unknowing blunder. There was something deadly in the storm of them; Benji felt that if he said the wrong word now the man would reach across the table to snap his neck with the same quiet control he'd spoken with.  _ Definitely  _ too many old horror stories. 

"Yes… sort of," he said cautiously; illogical or not, his amygdala-based response to the vibe rolling off William wouldn't be stifled. "I had a sort of dabble at some kind of slice-of-life account of the- period. It didn't go well." William's face urged him to continue talking, so in his fluster, he said, "Actually, none of the writing has lately, regardless of topic. I think I've drained the well." Released by William at last, he dropped his eyes to the wood of the table.

"I'd like to read it, if you want to share," Buffy said quietly. Then continued more normally, "We've got a few books on local history, but they only cover the last century. The place has changed a lot." She picked up their empty mugs and took them to the bench, and the room went back to how it had felt earlier. 

"Have you seen the photo exhibition at the gallery?" he asked, since the pre- and post- upheaval history seemed to be acceptable. 

"We don't get out much," William said. "Any good?" 

"Probably nothing you haven't seen in books." 

William nodded. "Ruepunzellastar'll be back out with the others tomorrow." 

The conversation moved back to goats, and he made to leave. They showed him to the door, with a pause to read the spines on the shelf of history books; Buffy turned the lights on to make it easier to see. At the door he thanked them for the coffee and told them to pop over sometime for one in return; they said Lily was welcome over the fence to visit her furry friends. He promised to drop off a copy of his aborted article attempt, repeating several times that it really only belonged in the compost bin; Buffy said she'd treasure it as an example of the vagaries of the creative process. Then they closed the door, and he felt eyes on his back all the way down the drive.

  
  


He copied his 'article', wondering what on earth had possessed him to admit to having it; any respect they'd held for his talents was about to vanish. Still, the lure of a story hiding in that shadowy house was compelling, and if they found this as hopelessly uninspired as he did, perhaps they would be able to prompt something of more interest. He left it in their letterbox.

That night he studied the glow in their windows with new theories swirling through his brain; skeletons in the family closet, definitely, but what kind? He'd run the maths; if the grandmother had been old enough to clearly remember living here, she couldn't have been around long after Buffy’s birth, assuming his estimation of her age was correct. So what could have happened during the quake period that was big enough to disturb her so thoroughly, separated by a generation as she was? And what had inspired her move here, only to hover on the very edge of town?

The mystery needed solving. He wished they’d take up his offer to drop in for coffee, but he highly doubted that they would. Still, they’d sounded honest in granting Lily permission to cross the boundary, so perhaps they weren’t quite as visitor-averse as they’d appeared. He would give it a week, he decided, and then he was going to need to borrow a cup of sugar. 

By Friday, it had gnawed at him enough that he ignored the typewriter and surrendered to the temptation of the internet. The house next door, according to council records, was owned by one 'William', no last name. Plugging that into the district library's historical documents search yielded too many results, of course. Buffy, though, that was an unusual one, and that was where it got interesting. There'd been one here during that final decade; she was listed as having graduated in 1999. The list of graduates followed an article about the high school itself being destroyed by an explosion in the gas lines; thank god society had progressed beyond burning volatile and limited natural resources for energy, and in time to save the entire planet burning. But he digressed. Assuming, for the moment, that it could be a family name and she the grandmother, he continued searching in the hopes of locating a sister. In 2001 her name popped up for the second and final time, in the death notice of her mother and alongside one Miss Dawn Summers. There was a sister, then. Younger, if the ordering was modern standard. And a mother who'd died when Buffy was twenty. No mention of a partner. The mother's name yielded a few more scraps - she'd managed a gallery, had won an award for her Christmas window display there one year. The sister gave him three more hits. She'd graduated from the local high school in 2005, while it was situated in temporary buildings on the university campus (having been destroyed once again, only this time by earthquakes). Two years later she'd won an award at the university itself; three years after that, she'd announced her nuptials to one Henry Roberts. And that was it. Perhaps they'd left town. 

He tapped his pc to turn the wallscreen off, and lay back on the couch, staring at the ceiling and pondering the road signs of a story. Perhaps Buffy Summers hadn't returned after the quakes, leaving her sister with a relative while she lived a life away from the town, and then regretted it too late… perhaps something had happened to Dawn while she was gone. Then she'd passed on a legacy of memories of happier guilt-free times together here, and the shadow of her guilty secret linked to the evacuation. No, too simple. Maybe Buffy had been implicated in the mother's death somehow, a fact that had come to light between the sisters when they came to flee with the rest… No, now he was heading down the horror route again. Maybe… Henry Roberts had been Buffy’s beau, until his true affections came out in the crisis. That was more promising; Buffy Summers had obviously snagged her own reproductive partner at some stage, so it could be a humorous story of muddled romances with happy endings for all. Unless Henry Roberts was Buffy-no-last-name's grandfather too, and after fleeing in shame from the rejection, Miss Summers kept the identity of her child's father a secret. 

This was all pointless. He couldn’t weave an acceptable happy story out of it, and he highly doubted this Buffy was actually the unknown grandmother of his neighbour. He watched TV until it was time to collect Lily for the weekend. 

  
  


*

 

Dad was waiting in the school collection lane like always, and he had the Most Effervescent News: Ruepunzellastar was back with the other goats, her babies with her,  _ and  _ Lily was allowed to go over the fence to play with them, as long as she asked Dad first, and kept away from the house in case the people were asleep or doing adult things. The people were called  _ William,  _ like the Last King of England in the movie, and  _ Buffy,  _ which wasn't a  _ real _ name but she would remember it anyway, because she was good at knowing names, and because it might hurt the woman's feelings to tell her that. She had to have afternoon tea first, which took a long time, but then she was free to climb over the fence and be a goat. 

When it started getting dark she walked with the babies up to the yard, in case they didn't know the way yet and got lost. The man - William - was waiting with the bucket, and she waved at him before she ran home. 

The next day he called her name when he saw her, and asked if she would like to give the goats their food. She liked this idea very much. The barn doors were open, and he showed her how to scoop the muesli from the bucket and tip it into a trough that ran along one wall. He held the bucket for her, and the goats kept trying to get it, standing on their hind legs and resting their front knees on him to balance, until most of the food was in the trough and all thirty-six shouldered together to eat it. Their shoulders came up to her chest, and she laughed at the press of furry bodies as they nudged each other and chewed sideways. The man watched her quietly, but he didn't say anything. 

On Sunday night, Buffy was there too, and she asked Lily what the babies' names were, because they didn't know what to call them. They were Ziggy and Zaggy, she informed them, because they jumped around like that all the time. Buffy nodded and repeated the names, and said that they were good ones. She was there with Wiliam every time after that. Neither of them said very much, and when they did talk, their voices were low and soft, like the sounds the goats sometimes made. They didn't really seem like adults. It made it easy to talk to them, so she told them about school and staying at her grandparents and that her birthday was soon and she would be seven. 

One weekend she told them that her Dad wanted them to come and see their house one day; he had bought bottles of beer, and one of wine, and one of whisky, because he did not know what they liked. William and Buffy looked at each other without saying anything, then William said, "Tell your dad we'll drop in one evening next week." He smiled, like maybe he wanted to laugh, and added, "Before he runs out of something again." 

She nodded gravely; she would carry the message. Then thought about it, chewing her lip, before granting permission to Buffy, "You can look at my room if you want. It's upstairs. I have sparkly curtains."

"Thank you," Buffy said, and smiled in a way that told Lily she was looking forward to being able to see them.

  
  


*

 

At bedtime (of course), Lily swung the bathroom door too hard, and let out an ear-splitting screech when it slammed onto her little finger. He barreled upstairs with his heart in his throat to find her snuffling on tears and holding it to her chest while she glared at the door. An ice pack was fetched, she was helped with her original mission of going to the toilet, and then they drove into town to have the squashed digit x-rayed at the after-hours A&E clinic. 

By the time they walked out again it was 2 am, and Lily (with her bruised but unbroken and now forgotten finger) was skipping about and chattering with the excitement only overtiredness can bring. He stopped at a drive-through machine for drinks, then pulled over for them to sip them in the car, hoping the combined effects of a bellyful of hot chocolate and the quiet drive home might push her towards sleep; tomorrow was school again. As they sat there her chattering calmed down until she was watching out of the window quietly; mission achieved. He was about to continue home when she sat up suddenly and tapped the button for the window to slide away. Buffy and William were standing a few yards back on the footpath, watching them.

"Hello," Lily said casually.

He sat up himself and leaned over to see better, thrown by the incongruity.

"Hello," Buffy said. "Are you okay?"

"Yes," said Lily, then held up her hand with the bandaged finger. "My finger got squashed in the door. But it's not broken, I had an x-ray."

"That’s lucky," Buffy said. 

Lily nodded. 

"Goodnight," said William, then they took a step back and seemed to vanish, swallowed by shadows without a sound.

Lily yawned, then pressed the button to close the window again. He blinked and leaned back to his seat slowly. Lily yawned again, wider, so he pressed the button to turn the car on again and pulled out from the curb, new questions bubbling. 

 


	3. Questions, Invitations, and Alcohol

 

 

 

They came the next night, knocking on the front door as he put the dishes away from dinner. He brushed his hands on his pants as he walked to the door, and opened it to find them standing back on the edge of the porch. Buffy wore a simple crossover sleeveless dress, made from a shimmery yellow fabric and falling to her knees. A bejewelled flower of the same shade sparkled in her hair, throwing reflected pinpoints of light across her golden tresses; her sandals held a second flower, clipped to one strap. Her eyes glittered with a touch of something softly pearlescent behind her darkened lashes, and for a long moment, he was held frozen by her, by the dazzling and somehow ethereal beauty of her, by her flawless smooth skin and the inscrutable ocean depths of her eyes. He snapped back to himself with a zing of fear, looking quickly to William at her side; the man was watching him with a sly smirk teasing the corner of his mouth in a way that simply oozed sexuality and confident amusement. His brown hair had been slicked back, and he wore a dark and silky long-sleeved shirt shot through with a twisting pattern of deep blue, hanging open over a fitted black t-shirt and somehow looking both casual and debonair. Together they were impossibly good-looking, and the 'alien royalty' theory popped up again from his memory. He felt underdressed (or, under-genetically-endowed), disadvantaged and back-footed; perhaps only fair after he'd caught them unprepared last time. Whatever shadows they owned were well masked tonight, and he hoped their clear upper hand would encourage them.

"Hello," he said, and felt it was the  _ hello  _ he'd been too slow for that morning, held in wait all day. 

"Hello," said William, and now they'd all said it and didn't seem to know where to go from here.

He remembered at last that he'd been requesting this visit, and realised it was his move. "Come in, please," he said, stepping back. "Can I offer you a drink?" 

They smiled then, shyness flickering through despite their evident confidence in themselves; he felt better about his own atrophied social skills for it. 

"That would be lovely," Buffy said as they stepped inside. "Lily's been reminding us of your invitation."

"I hope she hasn't been making a nuisance of herself?" he asked, suddenly wondering if this were the reason they'd finally appeared.

"No," Buffy said, so quickly that it had to be genuine. "Not at all."

"Do let me know if she does," he said, and she nodded in a manner that suggested she wouldn't be.

"How's the finger?" William asked as they reached the open-plan kitchen/living room, and he told them how Lily had forgotten all about it by this morning (or at least, she had until she'd seen the purple splodge of a bruise on her fingernail). 

After glancing around the room quickly, they gravitated to the wall of bookshelves, holding his (smaller) collection of hardcover paperbooks, decorative odds and ends, and the occasional item of Lily's, all of which they perused with polite interest, hands held close to themselves. 

Alcohol; alcohol was what this situation needed. He waved the fridge to slide open and offered a selection; they both chose glasses of whisky. He took a gulp of his own and felt the artificial warmth tingle through him, settling his tension and smoothing his fingers. Carrying the bottle to the coffee table, he sat down on a couch and motioned to the one opposite. They moved from the bookshelves to join him, and he offered the loan of any books that had caught their interest, sparking a conversation on the experience of holding a physical one after staring at a screen for hours. Glasses were emptied and refilled; tongues began to loosen and limbs relax. He told them of his previous job, in the outdoor section of the local gardening store, where he'd written much of his book in the spaces between customers. He'd quit when the book seemed to take off overnight and his bank balance skyrocketed with it. Still seemed unbelievable to him now, five years on.

He'd already told them too much about his problems writing, but Buffy brought up the pages he'd delivered and sounded genuine in her appreciation of the style he'd used for it, though she sidestepped commenting on the content. Emboldened by his second glass of whisky, he pushed for an opinion on the snippets of fact included - how widely separated was his fictional character's view of Sunnydale from what she'd learnt of her grandmother's? 

She chuckled slightly then, ducking her head at some private joke. "Very widely," she said. "Worlds apart in some ways. But in others… I think that's exactly how it would have appeared."

"I'd love to hear some of her stories one day," he said. "Don't worry, I won't go writing them into anything without express permission. Though if you do have any general suggestions for a more authentic take on the period, I'm all ears."

She thought for a moment. "There were a lot of small details of everyday life in them. The club she went to with her friends, the bands that played there. Cheerleading- you know what cheerleading was?" He nodded eagerly. "Cheerleading tryouts. The shops on the main street. If you… if you're going to continue it maybe, I might be able to fill in some bits and pieces. And William is a whole library of history." She smiled at him, passing the conversation over and leaning back in her seat.

"Twentieth-century," William clarified. "Couple of years uni on it, several more before and after for my own interest. 'M not so hot on the last century, but anything from about 1880 up until the millennium always intrigued me."

"The Century of Invention," he recited wistfully. "It must have been a fascinating time. Ever read any of the sci-fi from that period? They seemed convinced we'd all live in space or cyberland by now." 

"Yeah," William grinned. "Instead we've just got the Mars research colony and full-immersion gaming." 

"True," he conceded. He supposed it was easy to overlook a million everyday details that would be astounding to a visitor from the past. He'd seen vehicles from the 2020s at a museum once, shining hard metal things with wide black pipes for the poison they exuded. Even older, firearms of various types, for killing animals in a barbaric and illogical hunt for sustenance when real food lay all around them. And for killing each other; there'd been wars, staggering murder statistics, true  _ evils _ , before the enlightenment of today. "You said you had ancestors from here too?" he asked William. 

The man nodded. "Great grandfather. Spent a few years here, was rather fond of the place. It's Buffy who has the local stories though. Her grandmother - Buffy Summers - was a remarkable woman. Seems wrong that no one wrote a book about her." He sounded genuinely affronted on behalf of his wife's relative; definitely a history lover.

Buffy smiled, privately amused again, and seeming flattered. Perhaps she'd been close to the woman as a child. And he had confirmation of the name now. He talked for a while about the timelessness of a personal story, about the importance of remembering the past. They saw straight through him, but seemed to be receptive to the idea, so he switched topics to let it marinate. 

When he stood up to excuse himself to the bathroom, wobbling a little now that the bottle was empty, Buffy stood too, and he realised he'd failed to give them a tour. She asked about Lily's room, mentioning a request to admire the curtains, so he directed her there and to the upstairs bathroom before using the downstairs one himself. He stumbled on the low step down when he returned to the living room, and William gave him a knowing grin before disappearing to the bathroom himself. 

Benji retrieved a can of coke from the fridge and loitered behind the bench to offer them the same. William reappeared first, turning down the offer of anything to drink and asking about the painting on the kitchen wall; when Buffy returned (looking perfectly sober, which was grossly unfair when she was half his size), they made their goodbyes and left.

  
  


The following morning - and more clear-headed - he ran back over the evening before and spotted his omission in not pressing them to come again soon. Taking inspiration from the romance novels of the late nineteenth century, and hoping William was as familiar with the customs of the time as Buffy had professed, he typed out a thank you note and calling card, dropping it in their mailbox on his way to the liquor store to restock. 

He came home armed with a selection of spirits, arranging them on a high shelf where Lily would be sure to notice their appearance and tattle. The typewriter sat waiting, seeming to fill itself with held breath; he hoped it wouldn't suffocate and float belly-up on the desk, but at least it appeared alive again for the time being. 

The weekend arrived, and Lily came and went, talking only of goats in regards to next door, and only of her friend's party next week for the rest. He chased down a faint memory of a movie advertisement seen years before, and eventually his brain spat out the title: Heidi, the goat-girl of Switzerland. They watched it on Sunday night with bowls of popcorn, and on Monday morning Lily announced that her name was no longer Lily. He expected to be informed that he must call her Heidi from now on -  _ Of course not,  _ she told him primly. The name was Schwanli, after the goat with white fur to match her own pale locks. 

Monday evening he put on a clean shirt, and eschewed the TV to read in silence with an ear cocked to the door; no one came. By Wednesday he was berating himself for this nosy obsession, beginning to admit once more that it was a foolish distraction from the way his life was drifting. 

That evening, they appeared again. 

He kept the liquor flowing and avoided talk of stories, hoping they'd come to it on their own, and eventually Buffy did. 

"I've been thinking about what you said," she said from her curled seat on the couch. "About people being remembered? If you wanted to write something real about Sunnydale - and if you were serious about the express permission - I could tell you some stories."

_ Yes!  _ He pulled his pc from his pocket and asked if he could record her. She backpedalled swiftly, so he switched it off and tossed it aside, but she still looked uncertain. He topped up their glasses and lounged back, giving her space. "How about we forget recording things said tonight," he said. "Fuck knows I'm in no state to handwrite, but I'd love to hear about her."

She smiled slightly, then seemed uncertain where to start.

"She was born here?" he prompted. 

"No. No, actually she moved here as a teenager. From LA." 

Interesting. "Do you know where she lived?"

"Yes. The house is still there… it's on Revello Drive. 2645 now. But it's been changed. You can probably- it's in a few of the photos in a book we have. Probably at that exhibition you were talking about too. It was two stories, three bedrooms… it has a sunroom on top now, and two of the bedrooms have been joined into one. We had a look when we first moved here." She fell silent, drifting off a little, and he remembered how she'd been the first day - how  _ they'd _ been the first day - and wondered whether this was a good idea at all; there might be things here that were better left buried. Before he could work out how to voice his thoughts, how to make it clear that his invitations weren't dependent on sharing and that they could forget it and discuss the weather, she shook herself slightly and continued. "She moved in there in 1997, with her mom and younger sister. She was sixteen, Dawn was ten. She had the front room." She paused, thinking. "Her mother - Joyce - owned a gallery, art and sculpture and the like. I don't think Buffy appreciated it until much later, but it was quite an achievement, you know? It can't have been easy running a business and dealing with two daughters on her own, especially back then."

He nodded; the gender issues that were still prevalent at the turn of the millennium were well known, and Joyce would have had to deal with some level of social stigma over her position. "I found an article about her winning the Christmas window display," he said. "I, uh, looked up your grandmother's name."

She paused again, probably realising he must have found the death notice, then smiled. "Yep. We heard about that. There was so much more though… it's strange, how everything and nothing is online these days. Sometimes it seems like a new world began in 2004, and everyone forgot the old one."

"People will themselves to forget the uncomfortable, and I think they often lose the good parts with it," he said. 

Buffy giggled, with a sense of wry humour. William chuckled with her and said, "Do they ever. Especially in these parts."

“So let’s claw some of it back,” Benji said. “And hey, if there’s a feel-good romance novel in there somewhere, we’ll split the profits.” He raised his glass.

Buffy laughed properly at that, a warm sunshiny sound that felt like honey and softened William's features into boyish admiration. "There's a few terrible ones first. But eventually… yes, there is." 

"Excellent," he announced, and knocked back his drink.

  
  
  
  
  



	4. Stories

 

 

 

Evening visits happened a couple of times a week after that. Finding itself relocated to the coffee table, his typewriter released the breath it had been holding and began dribbling out pages here and there. He'd suggested a pen and paper first, but that received a very firm no; luckily, he could drink and type well enough, and when he couldn’t, it brought warm laughter. They always matched him glass-for-glass, never appearing affected by it, and after two solid hangovers from trying to push their seemingly magical sobriety past its limits, he gave up and slowed down, cutting his whisky with coke.

The stories came in snippets, more full and frequent as he listened actively and a tentative camaraderie began to form. The tapping of the keyboard blended with music from the era, playing on his wallscreen in two-dimensional and horribly low-resolution music videos, all featuring the height of plastic fashion and the commercialised frenzy of the 1990s. William clucked his disgust at the pop-iest tracks, but when she got up to dance to her favourites he'd sometimes join her, with a mandatory roll of his eyes. They danced like great cats, prowly and sinuous, lithe and lean, and as he sprawled tipsily on a chair, enraptured by the mysterious beauty of them, he sometimes wondered exactly what it was that he'd invited into his home. 

In the morning light he'd gaze around the living room at empty glasses and messy pages, and find himself unable to discern where reality ended and dreams began - he had a vague image of William once catching his dropped bottle for him, mid-air and impossibly fast; another of Buffy catching his dropped whole self when he stumbled on the step-down again, plonking him back on his feet as if he were weightless, but these couldn't be right. 

Collating the notes, he was wary of extrapolating anything - she made these people feel so very real, so well known, that touching his own fiction to them would feel like lying. So he ordered the pages as best he could into a rough timeline and waited to see what emerged, marking the occasional point to query later. The level of detail she seemed to have was astounding, and though he wondered how much must surely have slipped in from her own subconsciousness, she often appeared to be holding back as much as she spoke.

The question of the evacuation soon faded into the background as he became caught up in the story that came before, his mind drawing pictures of a school library with shelves full of paperbooks, a trio of teenagers, a broody older boyfriend with some kind of cultural barrier he didn't quite understand and a gang history. "She thought they had this whole romantic Romeo and Juliet thing going on," Buffy said, waving her hand. "She should have read the end of the play first." 

"It ended badly?" he asked. 

"Did I mention there were a few terrible failures before the feel-good bestseller?" She smiled in the odd self-deprecating way she had, as though her grandmother's mistakes were her own; he supposed most people could emphasise with a tale of love gone wrong. Fuck knew he could. 

"But there's a happy ending?" he asked with a grin, knowing by now how she loved to be reminded. 

"Yeah," she said, the smile softening. 

  
  


One Friday in April, Lily's seventh birthday arrived, and she returned from next door clutching a brown speckled soft toy goat with a bell on its collar; it went with her everywhere from that day on, and after an unusual amount of deliberation was given the name Lola. 

He tried to fill the rest of the weekend with constant excitement, succeeding to the point where perhaps it overflowed - she fell asleep on the short drive home from the circus on Sunday evening, and he carried her in to bed, mentally cancelling the pizza slumber party for two. But at least they'd avoided the previous year's meltdown. 

A week later Lily's grandparents wanted to meet to discuss 'options' for school next year, still convinced she would receive a better (stricter) education at the school on the other (further) side of their home. Across the table of a local café, he gave their argument twenty minutes of close-mouthed attention, then informed them that no, Lily would in fact be staying at her current school for the following year, as she was happy there. They nodded brusquely, themselves now close-lipped, and left in a shuffle of suppressed words. He sat there another half hour, waiting for the sick feeling in his gullet to sink down to the pit of his stomach, where it mixed with the cafe latte until everything felt curdled. He bolted before he could cause a scene by vomiting all over the table. 

Something of it must have remained on his face until that evening; when he opened the door, William tilted his head, studying him in a way that felt uncannily as though he were reading a transcript written there that told precisely how the day had played out. 

"Bad time?" William asked in a soft rumble. 

"No," he said, stepping back to let them in. "Well, yes, bad day, but I am more than ready for a distraction from it."

"Just call me distracto-girl," Buffy said brightly. As she stepped inside, her hand settled on his forearm for a brief moment, a gentle touch of warm human contact that said everything her light tone of voice didn’t. 

He resolved to stick to straight coke for the night, afraid the evening might otherwise end with him blubbering tearful declarations of best friendship to them both. 

While she paused, William had bounced ahead to lay claim to the wallscreen controls, and she told her tale for the evening to a background of Bobby Dylan, mild and mellow next to the man's usual selections. Between them they knew the lyrics to thousands of tracks from the nineteen hundreds, and William was determined to educate him on the music culture of the nineteen 70s and 80s - the decades before 'it all went to shit'. Music seemed to capture things that were otherwise absent from history, the human emotions of the times in its rough voices and tribal drumbeats. In the anti-war ballads of the 1960s he heard voices of reason rising together when the politics seemed insane, and thought he began to understand the undercurrent of fear in the population; in Crass' Penis Envy the militant anger of these spokespeople for an entire half the population being treated as second-class citizens caught him and charged him and set him to researching the stories of the human equalitists of the early millennium. The songs were at once utterly foreign and yet instinctively relatable, the sense of pain and loss, love and excitement, all unchanged at their deepest core for the whole of human experience. 

Another of Dylan's ten-minute poems wound to a close as she finished telling him about the way Giles had covered a different track at the local coffee house, and between the soft regret that often coloured the end of her recollections of this man, and Benji's own cafe experience earlier that day, the room fell into a glum silence. 

"Tell this one," said William, with a lazy smirk. " _ Show  _ it." He stabbed the screen of Benji's pocket computer, and a new song kicked in with a cymbal clash, rolling drums and deep guitar. 

"You tell it," she said with her own smirk, climbing to her feet. 

"Alright," he said, as she began to dance, her lips smiling as she sung along,  _ I'm one step away, from crashing to my knees... _

And so that night he gained a new character for the tale, clapping in the alleyway behind The Bronze and offering a name that would perhaps better suit one of the goats.

  
  


On the last day of April, Buffy was quiet, her smiles somewhat forced and her feet tucked tightly beneath her, while William seemed on edge, sharply expectant somehow. They left early, and he leaned on the door frame watching as they walked down the drive, wondering anew what haunted them. 

Two days later, Lily brought back the news that Buffy was sick and they might not be over for a while. 

  
  
  


*

 

On Saturday they baked cookies, big lumpy ones with brown chocolate and white. When they were cool, Dad took out a cardboard carton and packed half of them into it for her to carry next door, because cookies are good for you when you're sick. 

She held them close and walked well behind the goats, so they wouldn't try to eat them, especially the babies, who were getting big enough to jump up to her chest. 

"What's this then?" William asked when she gave him the box. He was doing that thing where people don't really look at you, like when they're on the phone.

"They're cookies, silly. For Buffy. We made them."

He looked at her properly then, and she thought he looked very sad.

"You can eat them too," she said. "There are lots."

He smiled, and snorted like the goats did. "Thanks, little swan. Let's feed these goats then."

  
  


The next evening Buffy was sitting on the back doorstep, waiting to thank her for the cookies. Her hair was all tied up in a ponytail, which made her look strange and small, and she had her arms folded, which made her look even smaller. Lily wanted to give her a hug, but she couldn’t work out how. 

She fed the goats and patted them goodnight quickly, trying to think of something to talk about but feeling shy again. 

William stood in the doorway, watching the dark trees that covered the yard. He didn't seem to have anything to say either, but he looked down and smiled at her when she said goodnight. On impulse, she wrapped her arms around his middle in a hug, and after a moment he put an arm around her back, hugging her in return. "Share it with Buffy," she whispered, then ran home. 

  
  


*

 

He paced the house, trying to decide whether he should go over there or give them their space. In the end he typed another note:  _ I hope you're feeling better soon. Please let me know if I can do anything.  _ It felt too brief and formal, but adding more words wouldn't help. 

To fill his evenings, he began retyping his stack of loose pages into an ordered narrative, marvelling again at just how much of it there was, six years of daily life at the turn of the millennium. Buffy-Anne (it was confusing to keep calling her Buffy, as though talking about his Buffy in third person) had had some remarkable experiences - virtual single parenthood to a teenager in a time without true social or state support for young parents, a best friend who's sexual orientation was only barely beginning to become culturally acceptable. A string of violent incidents that caused injury to herself and death to members of her social group. A neurologically disordered first love who had actually been responsible for one of the aforementioned deaths, which Buffy-Anne blamed herself for. At one point she had spent five months hospitalised, with no contact with her friends and remaining family member; he wasn't clear on whether the hospitalisation was for injuries sustained in a fall, or psychiatric care for the fall being a jump. Given the scarcer details and general tone of the stories following her return, he suspected the latter, and the story trailed off not long afterwards, with another death and the exit of two main characters. There was more, certainly. The earthquakes were the following year, and she'd slipped that everyone had returned beforehand. He would be patient. 

Then there was the love story. It was a hate story in the beginning, one fought over the same indecipherable cultural barriers as her first relationship and filled with seemingly overwhelming challenges. But the way they spoke of it… this, then, was the real story, and perhaps the key to the events that made the evacuation a no-go zone for discussion. 

It came to more than a hundred pages so far, and as he put together an outline, it suddenly struck him: in five of the six years, awful events had happened during May. A traumatic drowning incident, her first love's incarceration for murder, the high school exploding in the midst of her graduation, the fall-or-jump that saw her hospitalised, the death of a close friend. And, untold as yet, whatever had happened during the evacuation, which had taken place in early May. 

He leaned on his bedroom windowsill, watching their house, unlit tonight, and wondering whether the carefully remembered family history was some kind of superstition; whether her sickness was that of an apprehensive wait for tragedy, perhaps accompanied by an inherited psychiatric condition. 

  
  


By the fourteenth he'd decided to go over there, fearing it would be irresponsible to allow Lily to bother them for a third weekend unasked when they were obviously shunning company. He waited until dusk, respecting what he knew of their hours, but when he opened the door, it was to find William walking up his driveway, alone. 

William stopped on the top step of the porch, hooking his thumbs into his pockets and leaning against the bannister. He looked both tired and tense, body drawn but with that vibe of lurking danger that Benji had stirred on their first meeting. 

"I was just coming over," Benji said, waving the box of herbal tea in his hand. "Thought I'd bring you this, and suggest I keep Lily home this weekend. She can be rather loud, I'm well aware."

William shook his head, smiling slightly, his sooty eyelashes dipping to mask his eyes. "Let her roam. It's nice to hear her out there."

Benji nodded. "How is she?" He pointed the tea box next door, clarifying which 'she' he meant. 

William shrugged one shoulder, looking back over there too. "She's okay. Just a seasonal thing." 

"Thought it might be." He considered, chewing his lip, then added, "first week of October, I get a bit the same."

William nodded once, understanding in the gesture; they knew, then. Maybe Lily had said. Though it was all on the internet anyway.

"Got your note," William said. "Thanks."

"I meant it. If there's anything I can do to help…"

"Thanks," he said again, in a manner that said,  _ No, but I appreciate it. _

"Come in?" Benji asked. "I've just finished organising all the pages so far, if you want a look."

William looked back at his house for a long moment, then pulled himself upright. "S'pose I'd better. 'M under instructions to get out and have fun." He grinned tightly, no amusement in it.

The living room seemed desaturated, the two of them forced to sit in opposition without a third point on their compass. He took out the stack of papers, then realised it was several hours worth of reading and offered to link the digital file, or print off a copy. 

"Print," William said, so he told the under-bench machine in the kitchen to start spitting out pages.

"Why do you use a typewriter?" William asked, standing to study the bookshelves again; he sounded mildly curious. Most people tended to shake their heads in disappointment and assume it was some affected artist eccentricity; they rarely asked, and when they did, it was cynically. 

"I like the tangibility of it," he said honestly. "Words just seem more real, more permanent, if you can touch them. Silly, I suppose, when they go straight onto the network version for edits and copies, but… I just like it." He ran his fingertips across the stack of papers, feeling the embossed imprint of the occasional thwacked letter.

William nodded, content with the answer. 

"Buffy-Anne must have come to hate May," he said as he squared off the printed stack. "Hers seem like they were cursed, poor woman."

"Yeah," William said slowly, and the hairs on the back of Benji's neck woke up at something in that voice. 

The room was suddenly much too quiet. He felt William's gaze burning into him, and kept his own firmly down, watching his hands fidgeting of their own accord with the pages on the bench. 

"It's not like that," William murmured. 

Benji wanted to protest -  _ not like what? -  _ but felt ashamed of the thought, as though William had somehow read his 'family superstition' theory word for word.

"Chit sorta lost her whole family in May. Five years ago."

_ Oh.  _ "I'm sorry," he said, because there didn’t seem anything else he could say, and because he was, that he'd pried into her closet like this. 

Later he would wonder exactly what 'sorta lost' meant; rationality would suggest maybe some kind of unbreachable dispute, disownment (perhaps they'd opposed her wedding?), but when he thought of her dead eyes that day in her kitchen, the 'sorta' vanished and he knew it had to be  _ lost.  _

  
  


*

 

"And what have you been up to this week?" William asked when he handed her the brush. The goats didn't get knots in their hair, like she did, but they liked it to be brushed, like she didn't. She sat on a hay bale with her legs crossed underneath her, and they jostled each other around for the best spot to present their flanks to be groomed. William sat down across from her and rubbed the goats with his fingers as they surged around him too. 

She thought for a while, then remembered something. "We had the Night Walk."

"The Night Walk?" he asked, like he didn't know what it was.

"At school. You stay there when the bell rings, and play games until it gets dark. Then you go for a walk. Then you go home."

William still looked confused. He often looked confused. 

“You look for animals and stuff in the dark. Like owls. It’s fun."

"With your class?"

"In groups. You get… one parent leader, and four children. But my group only had me and Sita and Finley. We went through Murchison Park, and around… another street."

He stood up. "Can I go and get Buffy? She'll really want to hear about it." He sounded excited; she supposed it was quite fun. Being at school at night was different from in the daytime, and they got to go in the staffroom to have hot chocolate. 

Lily nodded, and tried to remember what the owl they had heard was called. 

He went through the door inside the barn that went into the house, and came back with Buffy. She was wearing a fluffy jumper that looked soft. Lily told her about the Night Walk, and how they heard an owl and saw two cats, and one of her friends from a different group told her he saw a mountain lion but she thought it had probably just been a big cat.

"And they do it every year?" Buffy asked again. 

"Yes. It's for learning about Our Local Environment. I went last year too."

"That’s great," Buffy said. "I'll bet the hot chocolate was yummy." Buffy was clever like that.

"It was." 

  
  
  



	5. Versions of Answers

 

 

 

They reappeared on his porch on the 22nd, both looking a little tired, a little worn, and much calmer. He'd resolved not to say anything, so only smiled and waved for them to come in. Buffy gave him a swift half-hug as she did and said, "I've missed you." 

He flicked on the wallscreen and offered a long list of drink options, not knowing if alcohol was the plan today or not; they took the same as always, and he relaxed.

"Your story," she said as soon as he sat down. "It's amazing. I kinda didn't realise I'd gone on so much."

" _ Your  _ story," he corrected. "And it is rather, isn't it? I feel like I know them." The story was amazing, he thought, self-bias of attachment aside. 

"Yeah but… you made it right. Real. It's like… you sucked out all these details I didn't think of remembering, and worked out how to play them back to me." She gestured as she talked, bubbling excitedly, then took a breath and stilled to say earnestly, "Just, thank you, Benji. I can't tell you what it means." She had though, in the wetness of her sparkling eyes.

"Thank  _ you,"  _ he said. 

"So, I figured you might want to know what happened at the end?" 

He was itching to, with a thirst that had only grown since he'd first heard her mention that her grandmother had been here around the time of the evacuation. On the other hand, these people had slowly become friends, treasured ones (his only real ones since his life fell upside down, but that was beside the point). Sating his curiosity was far down in importance behind their comfort. "Only if you're willing," he said gently. 

She told it chronologically, with many hesitations, seeming to cast about for the right way to explain certain things. Willow had returned from the rehab clinic (after the murder of her girlfriend, she'd attempted to drown her pain in her previously-beaten drug addiction). Giles returned, with a large group of younger girls he'd been made responsible for and wanted Buffy-Anne to help mentor; there'd been an upheaval and staff loss amongst the guidance organisation he worked for. 

And Spike returned. Their relationship had been a secret until after it had ended, hidden from her friends' disapproval, tumultuous and seemingly irrevocably entwined with the cultural walls that should have prevented it. He'd been some sort of fighter, raised in the same gang that had somehow been responsible for Angel's mental health issues; Benji had read of children raised harshly on the streets back then, taught to suppress their true emotions, mixed up in illicit drug culture and treated with prejudice by society at large. Whenever he expressed sympathy for Spike before this exit and return, William would sneer and disparage the man with the same kind of unsympathetic polar thinking Buffy-Anne and her friends seemed to have been prone to; Buffy, however, championed him with steady conviction. Spike had left, she explained, when it became clear that his gang ties presented an insurmountable barrier to a healthy relationship with Buffy-Anne. 

"He hurt the girl," William said bluntly. "Stop whitewashing it."

Buffy locked eyes with him for a long moment, then nodded. "He did. Badly. And it horrified him. He left that night."

He'd travelled to the home of some gang leader, where he'd had to win a series of physical fights in order to have his affiliations wiped and freedom granted. Returning, he'd felt hopeless, adrift without the morals he'd aspired to and now discarded, unworthy of ever being anything to the girl he'd hurt, yet drawn into her orbit all the same. She'd eventually discovered the change he'd made, and when gang members who didn't accept his rejection came after him, had taken him into her home and defended him from friend and foe alike, even retrieving him from a kidnapping by his former allies. 

"And then?" 

"See, this part's going to be harder to describe," she said. "Everyone's got the wrong information, for one thing. There were no warning rumbles. There was… a vibe. A feeling. An omnipresent weight of coming doom, like the way you can feel a thunderstorm approaching. Gang activity increased exponentially, more members arriving from other towns… people were killed… the population got nervous, and began to leave, fearing some kind of outright warfare. Soon the whole town was evacuating. Buffy-Anne represented something, with the way she'd stood up to them in the past; it made her a target. Her friends were determined to stay put and defend themselves and their town, but they clashed over methods… Buffy-Anne wanted to make a show of force to the gang, and they refused to back her. Everyone was sniping at each other, affected by the atmosphere… she had to get away for a night-"

"They threw her out of her house," William said, indignant.

She glared at him. "It wasn’t-" She sighed. "Yeah, they sort of did. It wasn’t their fault though, they were just afraid. Don't…"

"I understand," Benji said. "Fear can do strange things to people." He'd stopped typing at William's interjection; as her silence stretched, he picked up his glass and leaned back into the couch. They could work out what to write later. She was always protective of the way Buffy-Anne's friends were perceived, anxious that he understood the depth of their love and support, the tiny details of character, like the way Willow babbled when she was excited, or Xander told terrible jokes to try and make them smile.

She took a gulp of her drink, then continued. "And that night, she realised that the only thing she could do to protect them was to leave, with Spike. So before morning, they left Sunnydale for the last time, without saying goodbye." Buffy put down her glass and excused herself to the toilet. 

William changed the playlist on the wallscreen, flicking through things in quick succession while asking him what he thought of some of them. Likewise hitting pause on the potentially upsetting topic, Benji debated the relative merits of The Rolling Stones vs The Beatles with gusto, and when Buffy returned she joined in for a time. 

Catching Benji's eyes straying back to the typewriter, she heaved a breath and nodded at it. "Go on then."

He grinned an embarrassed thank you, and she continued. 

"Two days later, the earthquakes happened. Sunnydale, Cleveland and Anchorage dropped overnight, water came up from the ground, and the entire gang left town, permanently." She paused, looking into the distance, while he bit his tongue hard. "Buffy and Spike never contacted anyone again. The rest we researched ourselves, later. Obviously. Giles found placements for the girls eventually, then he moved back to England. Willow and Andrew stayed in the house on Revello Drive with Dawn, until she graduated the following year. Then Willow went back to England too, and Xander and Anya moved in with their daughter - Jessica - it turned out that feeling of omnipresent doom had a lot of people hiding under the duvet, and there was a baby boom nine months later. When Jessica was one, Anya had Xander cover an entire page of the local paper with their wedding announcement and invited the reporter along - then she left him at the altar. They never got married. He started his own building company in time for the boom here, signed it over to Anya, and eventually they moved into their own place. Jessica's son still runs the company - Jenkins Construction - he lives in LA - we talked to him on the phone… he remembers them being very happy." She stopped. 

"He sent us photos," William added.

"Yes," she smiled, somewhat painfully. "I'll show you sometime, if you want."

"I'd love that," Benji said. Strange to think that there were actual photos of these long ago people who seemed to exist only in their heads and her words.

"Andrew lived at Revello until his death. His husband - Tom - moved in in 2015. Dawn… she'd left long before, of course, but she held onto the house, even though its value skyrocketed… they rented it from her…" She took another gulp of her drink. "Sorry. Anyway. Dawn was married in 2011 and moved to San Diego. She never had children… I don’t know if maybe she couldn't, or if she didn't want to… I wish she'd gone back to keeping a diary. Maybe. When- after her, the house went to the guidance organisation - they're still around, just doing different work - they rent it out now. There were some more photos, a letter, other things, left with them, for anyone who came asking… that's the end, I guess," she finished sadly. 

"No it's not," William snorted. He lifted an eyebrow at Benji, prompting him to ask.

"What happened to Buffy and Spike?" 

"Oh." She smiled. "They went far away, and a year later they got married, and lived happily ever after."

"But…" 

"They just couldn't. Go back." Her voice cut off any chance of a different answer. 

Witness protection, maybe? New identities? There could have been messages passed, surely, but perhaps they were too afraid? They didn't seem to have been the sort of people to let fear make their choices. Perhaps they'd thought a clean break was best for everyone. 

"If you are going to send it to your agent," William said - Benji had been nudging for permission to do so - "make up something dramatic. Some final blaze-of-glory firefight. A death befitting her. Make it clear she fought with every last scrap of herself, and  _ never  _ would have left everyone like that if she’d had any choice." He was pointing by the end, finger stabbing at the typewriter to command it to capture his intensity on paper.

Buffy tugged him back against her by the elbow and scruffed up the back of his hair affectionately. "And neither would he."

"So you'll consider it?" he asked, mentally crossing his fingers. It wasn’t a feel-good and lighthearted romance novel - it was gritty, raw, sometimes heartbreaking (and sometimes hilarious) - but it captured a rare brand of inner strength, a faith in one's self, one's friends, the spirit of the world as a whole, that made it all feel worthwhile. 

"Yep," she said. "Everyone should know about it. They were special people, her friends. Family."

"Okay," he said, grinning irrepressibly, "alright. And I will draft you the very best ending my brain can supply."

  
  


The ending was tough, spinning through his head in vague flashes here and there and refusing to be nailed to coherent words. It consumed him for three weeks; hovering in the corner while he dove into editing the pile of pages that had become a manuscript, chasing through his dreams at night, pulling in lyrics from the old songs playing while he cooked dinner. When he finally presented it to them, it was with an embarrassed flush, sure it read terribly. They loved it. 

He forwarded the completed draft to his agent; they sent back a note asking,  _ What the fuck is this?  _ But three days later, they told him to polish it up ready for contract offers. He tried again to convince Buffy and William to put their names to it, pseudonyms, anything; they continued shooting him down, but Buffy asked him to dedicate it to everyone else, their names changed in the story itself for anonymity. In the end he used a pseudonym for his own name too, feeling that way it equally belonged to them all. 

The contract for publishing was signed, and he carried a case of champagne next door, knowing they'd drink it like water, which they did. William lit candles - actual wax candles, with living flames, from an old-fashioned silver lighter kept in his pocket. A few bottles into the case, Benji began fantasising that they were back in the year 1900, surrounded by books and candles as they were; his meanderings on this made William burst into laughter. 

Buffy brought out photos on her lapscreen, and for the first time, he saw the faces of these people he felt he knew. There were shots of Xander and Anya with their daughter at various ages, of Dawn’s wedding and Andrew’s. An older Dawn at her San Diego beach house, Willow with a group of women wearing kind smiles. Giles in some sort of staff photo where the uniform appeared to be tweed suits. Angel on a sunny porch with a yellow dog, Faith pulling the finger and grinning. And at the end, a group of shots of them all sitting tightly together on a set of wooden steps - Giles, Willow, Xander, a pregnant Anya, Andrew, and Dawn holding some sort of blurred out page. 

"That was right before Giles left," Buffy told him. "Back porch of Revello." 

"There's none of Buffy-Anne, or Spike," he said. He was certain she must have some, hidden away.

"No." 

He nodded, accepting. He still knew so little about these people - not a hundredth of what he knew about her ancestors - and now that one mystery was solved to some degree, the one right in front of him was growing. They were at once both completely confident and weirdly reticent, open and playful on any topic bar their personal history or everyday life. He still didn't even know what they did for a job, other than it being online and probably at night. 

Buffy seemed to take pity on him, eyeing him sympathetically before amending her answer to, "Maybe one day."

"I shall wait in patient silence," he said, smiling. 

He woke up on their couch the next afternoon, glad for the thick curtains which kept the room dim and cool for his throbbing head. He really ought to stop drinking like a teenager, but it was hard to keep track when they never seemed to need to. He sat up slowly, rubbing his eyes, and looked around this peculiar room again, feeling like some missing piece of the puzzle was right before him. Then a goat bleated in the yard, and the feeling vanished. 

  
  


There were interview questions to email answers back to, a corner on the city's news website advertising this new local book. Buffy and William got cold feet briefly, triple checking exactly how he'd described Giles' job, probably concerned it could be recognised by whatever the organisation was today. Then the first few positive reader reviews came in, praising the characters and expressing their love for them, and they relaxed. 

_Is it all real?_ the readers wanted to know, emailing him from the Amoogle Books site. He tossed the screen with their questions to Buffy one night, and she filled the answers with, _As real as a misty night._ _As real as a lost daydream._

"It is," he said to her, one evening in September, "and it isn't. There's… more somewhere." He pushed it playfully every now and then, and though she'd always acknowledged that there were secrets she'd kept back ( _ it's hard to explain) _ , she never gave anything away.

Tonight was different. "Do you really want to know?" she asked seriously. Then answered herself, "Of course you do." She stretched out on the couch, legs dangling off the end and head resting on the heel of one hand to watch him. "What if I told you an entirely different story. One that couldn’t possibly be true, full of myth and metaphor. Would it negate the first one?"

"No," he said carefully. There was obviously exaggeration and metaphor at play in the story he already had; the gang description never quite felt accurate. "Perhaps it would add a certain depth of understanding beyond what factual prose can convey."

She giggled, eyes sparkling with secret amusement, and he had to laugh with her. Sometimes she reminded him of the fey of ancient tales, with her girlish giggles and swirling golden mane, tiny pale hands and enchanting green eyes. She was bewitching, beguiling - and utterly besotted with her husband, in a way that had stopped being painful and now made him warmed by their radiance together. 

"Put the man out of his misery, luv," William told her. 

"Okay. Check your email later." She winked at him, and he laughed again. 

They left soon afterwards, and his pc beeped as soon as he'd closed the door. 

_ Here you go, you nosy bugger,  _ she'd written, and attached a file:  _ Active Watcher's Journals 199701 - 200302, condensed.  _

He sat down on the couch again, and began to read. There was a cover sheet first, bearing a coat of arms and a quote… 

_ Into every generation, there is a chosen one. One girl in all the world. She alone will wield the strength and skill to stand against the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness; To stop the spread of their evil and the swell of their numbers. She is the Slayer. _

Followed by three hundred pages of text, in the format of journal entries. 

There were no names or locations, only coded numbers. Large portions had been blacked out; others he was too lacking in context or vocabulary to make sense of. He asked himself several times what it was exactly that he was reading; felt he ought to disengage and kick his frontal lobe into gear. Instead he picked up his copy of their book and matched characters to code numbers, events to their metaphorical descriptions, and lost himself in imagination.

By 4 am he had no answers, only new questions. The final entry was the day before the earthquakes; the house was barricaded, weapons readied, and everyone praying for Buffy to return. 

He dreamed of lurking beasts, glowing red eyes and screams in the dark. He woke in the morning sunshine and felt himself a fool. 

_ As real as a lost daydream. Full of myth and metaphor.  _

Buffy-Anne's unknown face had become Buffy’s (as it was bound to), and now he imagined her holding a shaft of wood, facing a snarling fanged man. And a smirking one, blue-eyed and besotted. 

Patrolling the parks at night. Standing up to a hellgod. Strangling a giant snake. Coming back from the dead.

Was it better to hear of an ancestor fighting a mythical beast, or the cruel reality of life? Maybe when life was crueller, myth grew to compensate; only now that the world was kinder could the story be told factually. 

He was a storyteller, people said, because he'd told his story. He carried the sequel around inside of him. But those were only repetition. 

He told a different one to Lily. One where the sequel was full of fluffy white clouds, softening and gentling. This was his real storytelling. 

 

And there was still something missing from Buffy-Anne's. 

 


	6. The Heaviness of Black Pages

 

 

 

In the last week of September, they told him to come to theirs next time ( _ anytime, pop over, we'll be around,  _ Buffy said). It gave him the option of hermiting himself away for the following week, and the option of understanding company, and he was thankful. The shame that usually heralded his too-predictable bouts of despondency never quite arrived; it was oddly reassuring to know he wasn't the only person who surrendered to wallowing alone at times.

On Monday morning Clive Porter rang; they hadn't spoken since high school, and Benji wondered how on earth the wanker had found his direct contact key. He flipped a few rude gestures at Clive's waving face on the wallscreen, then sighed and accepted the call to get it over with. He listened to the Clive blab on long enough to confirm that his parents had been giving his number out again and that the guy was after money. Then he told him to fuck off, and hung up. He thought about ringing his parents immediately, to go over it again -  _ It doesn't matter who they say they are, they can find my email all over the internet if they want to get in touch -  _ but if he rang this week, his mother would assume he was desperately lonely and start fretting again, as she periodically did since finally being persuaded it was okay to leave her thirty-two-year-old son and move to her Florida dreamhouse. 

Rather than deal with her today, he picked up a couple of bottles of wickedly strong vodka and resolved to lose the rest of the week, as he successfully had the previous year. One glass in, he found he didn't really have the drive to do that either, and curled up on the couch with a blanket to watch mindless TV through the night. Somewhere the following morning he nodded off, and when he woke up fresh in the evening the timing seemed almost serendipitous for visiting his nocturnal friends, so he grabbed the bottles and headed over. 

Somewhere around midnight, Buffy said idly, "You know, I hear it's good to do the talking thing." 

And so somehow he ended up telling them about Caroline, about the marriage that barely lasted a year, about how she'd moved back in with her parents, about the year of awkward exchanges of Lily and nasty mutterings. And about how she'd been killed crossing the street one day, and he'd been stuck forever with his unspoken apologies and regrets. And the other one, which he was most ashamed of: anger, raging anger at her for leaving and ignoring and never bloody learning to look both ways, on the street or in anything else. And second helpings for himself, for the first and where it had got him, for his cold shoulder that would never be warm again. 

They didn't try to tell him he was being ridiculous, and they didn’t vilify her for leaving. They simply accepted his words with gentle empathy, and he knew that they understood somehow. 

When he had finished he bade them goodnight, and walked home feeling lighter. He was reluctant to go to sleep, fearing the gloom would return with the daylight; instead he looked at the Watcher's Journals again, and thought about the lingering mystery. He sent them an email - _Thank you,_ _I found it good to do the talking thing. I wish the slayer had been able to talk about what happened at the end._

They replied a minute later -  _ You’re welcome. And no, you really don't.  _

He chuckled, leaning on his bedroom windowsill and wondering just what it was that they did at this hour. -  _ I really do,  _ he sent back. 

_ \- It would be too disturbing,  _ they said. -  _ Probably destroy your comfortable view of the world. Forever.  _

_ \- Someone should know it,  _ he insisted. -  _ Beyond yourselves, I mean. And the world should be viewed with honesty, not comfort.  _

_ \- Maybe they didn't want it to be known.  _

_ \- Maybe they just needed the right friend to know it. _ He felt awkward about that one, especially when no reply was forthcoming for a whole half hour. 

\-  _ Okay,  _ they finally said.   
  


It came on crinkled pages in the letterbox, handwritten with messy black ballpoint pen, and it was there that morning, so they must have had it ready for this decision. 

It began before the end of the Journal, with a different account of what had been recorded there as a fruitless investigation… 

  
  


*

  
  


**** What the watcher found in his portal:  
  


"How did this happen?" he asked the Eye of Beljoxa.

_ Something good was taken without payment. Something evil was empowered in turn.  _

"Can we- she has to go back," he said. His heart sunk at the confirmation, but he felt he'd always known this was coming. 

_ She cannot. Death will not collect from her thrice. _

"You mean Buffy’s immortal?" Anya asked. 

_ No. I mean her death will not be counted. Her lifeforce will not be returned, and the world will remain in the grip of the First. _

  
  
  


**** What the slayer found in hers:  
  


_ The hellmouth's last guardian,  _ the shadowman called her. He touched her forehead, and she saw: 

There was a cavern under Sunnydale, vaster than she could comprehend, fading into the distance. And in the cavern, wall to wall, there were ubervamps. 

There was a cavern under Cleveland. There was a cavern under Anchorage. And they were filled with ubervamps. 

The hellmouth and its offshoots would open, and the ubervamps would come out. She would fall, and humanity with her.

"How do I stop it?" she asked.

_ You cannot. _

 

This slayer did not have those words in her dictionary. 

  
  
  


**** What followed:  
  


Every night, she saw them again in her dreams. Untold thousands of snarling faces, rising from the ground like a terrible wave. The earth splitting, tearing, wrenching; fire pouring forth in rivers of lava, hellbeasts cackling as they ran along the flames. She kept her mouth shut, for the others were all scared enough, hopeless enough, without this horror vision of the end. 

The bringers multiplied; no matter how many she killed, the next night there were more, circling the house and pouncing on anyone who ventured out. They brought death, to three of the girls, to Robin Wood, to anyone who dared to step into the night. 

There was no target beyond the voiceless bringers, beyond the untouchable force that wore the faces of their dead and spat its vile poison into their minds day and night. They blocked their ears; they paired off and made sure they were never in a room alone. The poison seeped in all the same, dripping corrosive acid into the ties that bound them together. They fought each other, vicious words spewing now from their own lips, while the First crossed her arms in the corner and smiled a smile the real Buffy’s face could never wear.

The town emptied. One morning people began to leave in ones and twos; by lunchtime, it was a stampede. Homes, possessions, all were abandoned in the sudden flood of primal fear which rendered them meaningless. 

That night food supplies were running low again, so Spike set out to loot the empty stores while the slayer stood guard between the girls and the darkness. But the darkness came from inside, and stabbed her in the back. 

She fled when she saw that it was hopeless, the faces of her friends closed to her, seeing only the target they all so desperately needed.  _ You’re not supposed to be here,  _ one of the girls hissed,  _ this is all your fault.  _ Willow turned her face away, shame colouring her cheeks; Xander looked at her for just a second, the shadow clearing to show sorrow and apology in his soft brown eyes. Then he turned his face to the ground. 

She stroked her sister’s hair as she stepped past her to the door; Dawn held herself rigid, emotionless, but the ghost of the fluid silk of that hair sunk into the whorls of the slayer's fingerprints, and was all she took with her.

She found an empty house, someone else’s empty bed. She sat on the edge and thought over it all, attempted to put strategy to the unfightable; it was hopeless. All she knew was that her stolen life was to blame, and this time her death could not assuage the imbalance. Death would not collect from her thrice. 

The slayer hung her head, and was too tired to cry.

And then Spike came, tracking the scent of her, the essence of her, drawn like a compass needle to the magnetism of her, into the unowned home that was now only a house. He saw her despair, and he scoffed in rebellion, obstinate, defiant, his faith in her inflexible when she had none. 

There were words, but these belong to them only. 

Then there were arms, between her and the world, an unassailable protective barrier to the evil force that wanted to tear her down. And in those arms, she slept. And in this true sleep, she saw her.

She was the emptiness in Kendra's frozen pupils; she was the touch of her mother's cold and lifeless hand. She was the water in an underground puddle; the space between a lightning flash and a sister’s blood. Her footsteps were on the watcher's stairs; her breath was the air below Chloe’s dangling feet. Hers was the voice that had called Annabelle out into the darkness; her hands had guided Tara’s feet to the window. 

She was the bad dream that holds you paralysed and mutes the scream in your throat; the ice that trickles down your spine. She was plague and warfare, famine and destruction. She was Spike’s final gasp, and that look of peace. 

And the slayer knew her, as no one else could.    
  


She opened her eyes calmly, and stole from the bed in silence. She thought of leaving a note, but what would be the point? If she were successful, he would know what she had done. If she failed, it would not matter, for he would go down in flames with her world. She kissed his forehead, soft as the flutter of a butterfly's wings, and she said the words she had held back so long, because perhaps they would be her last in this world. Then she snuck from the house. 

He caught up with her at the end of the street.   


"Go home, Spike," she said, refusing to look at him as he dropped in beside her. 

"Nah."

She sighed, and hoped he would be left behind on the way. 

Her feet carried her through the empty streets of her town, past empty shops with broken windows, past Giles' old flat and the mansion on Crawford St. Spike did not ask where she was going, and she could not have explained if he had, but she knew he would follow no matter where she led. At the edge of town she turned off the asphalt, out across the sand, past the dim shapes of trees, past the dry desert grasses. Spike flicked a glance behind them at the horizon, for it was nearing sunrise, and there was no cover out here. 

She stopped. "You should turn back."

He looked at the sky, and he looked at the emptiness ahead, and he looked at her face. "No."

"You can tell them where I went."

"I'll not let you go alone," he said quietly, and she knew that he understood something of where they were going. 

"You might not be able to come," she said. 

"Already dead, ain't I? Reckon it's my place to come with."

He had made his choice, so she carried on with him beside her.   


The sun never rose, the moon and stars faded away; she took his hand to keep them together as their world bled away into darkness. How far they travelled from the light, neither ever knew; the journey was as long as the silence between heartbeats, as short as a lifetime of loss; a fever dream on a bad drug trip.

Sand became shale, shifting and crumbling beneath their feet, then cliffs of obsidian, razor-edged and glass-hard, cutting into her palm when she stumbled. Hot rubies of blood fell from her fingers to land as red ruby hailstones, frozen solid by the chill of the air; shards of ice prickled Spike’s eyes. They climbed, scrabbling and clawing their way over wet stone and smooth ice, charcoal flakes and shards of bone. Spike leashed their wrists together with his belt, to free their hands; during the spaces between each touch of skin on skin, she knew she was chained to something that was not he. The only sound was the trickling of water, the only scent that of ash.  


At last they came to a flat plane, and here the trickling ceased. Ahead stood a cave, a light that was not light glistening wetly on its edges. And in the entrance of the cave, stood Death. 

She was a shadow framed in the doorway, at once both formlessly terrible, and the shadow of the slayer herself. Her eyes were dead stars, darkness inside darkness, watching emotionlessly as the slayer halted level with her.

Spike’s hand held hers again, and it shook with silent fear, yet she knew he would not back down. 

"You do not belong here," Death told the slayer. "This is a place for the dead." Her voice was the whisper of sifting dust in still air.

"I belong with the dead," the slayer said. 

"Perhaps. But this is not my concern. I have done my duty in regards to you."

"This is my duty," the slayer said. "The balance must be restored. I deliver myself to you." 

Death laughed, a sound broken and grazing. "I don't take deliveries. There are no pleas, no tears, no bargains here." The words fell with a weight of cold truth.

"I’m not leaving until you accept my life and return the balance of power in the world."

Death grimaced, for as the slayer knew Death, so Death knew this slayer. "If that is your decision," she said. "This is your home, as it is mine."

They followed her inside the cave, and saw that it was true - in the ashy black shapes of the darkness were the walls of the slayer's house, the markers of her cemeteries, the door to her bedroom. All was lit with the light that was not light, a liquid darkness contrasting with black smoke.

"Would you eat?" Death asked, and she motioned to a banquet spread on a table, all as burnt to ash and charcoal as the rest. 

"No," said the slayer. "I would challenge you." For if Death could not be bartered with, perhaps she could be gambled. 

"I will spar with you," Death said, seeming to nod.

"If I win, you will accept my offering."

Death laughed again, a hideous sound. "And if I win, Slayer, you must give me something other than your life."

"No," Spike whispered, whether to her or to Death she did not know, and tried to step before her.

"This is my place," she told him. "No one can do this but I."

The slayer nodded to Death, and shook out her arms.

They fought in a wild swirl of black and gold, a swishing of air, the flashing sparks of struck flintstone and the soot of a funeral pyre.

Spike could not track what went on in the fight, only that it seemed to last forever, and that in the end, Death held the slayer pinned to the wall, an obsidian stake to her chest. 

"You win," the slayer murmured, and Death released her.

The obsidian stake vanished, and Death held out a knife and an open palm. The slayer took the knife, swept together her golden mane, and sliced it off close to her skin. She placed it in Death's palm, and they nodded to each other. Then the darkness grew, and Spike and the slayer felt themselves dismissed. 

Behind the door to the slayer's bedroom was a nightmare of her bed, and here they retreated, the ashen sheets burning harsh against their skin. The window on the far side of the room stood open, and when Spike looked through it, he saw a path leading down the mountain. 

"You should take it," the slayer told him.

"Not on my own," he told her. 

He closed a curtain of smoke over the invitation, and lay down beside her. They said nothing, because there was nothing they could say. She rested her head on him, and they slept.   
  


When they awoke, she was colder, or he was, the chill of the place seeping into their bones in sleep to make their muscles ache and fingers slow. 

She touched the tufts of her hair, and was embarrassed by the tears that sprung up for this painless removal of one part of herself when she'd come here to lose it all; at the time she'd consoled herself that hair grew, but hers would not unless she failed. She took her singlet off from under her shirt, tied it on her head like a bandana, then stood to go and face Death again. 

Outside her door they found Death waiting, a bottle of something viscous and dark in hand. The slayer challenged her to combat again, and when Spike objected loudly to this course of action, the shadows in the room thickened, muffling and obscuring until all sound was gone, and so they fought in silence.

The fight was longer and blacker, distorted by shadow and lack of sound; at the end, the slayer was pinned again. 

The shadows drew back and, "You win," she whispered. Released, she probed with her tongue at a tooth knocked loose in the fight, wondering how much pressure it would take to remove; Death shook her head, and handed her the bottle. The slayer drank, and the liquid seeped through her like an oil spill on a seabird's feathers, and when it smoothed, she could no longer sense Spike. 

"What did it do?" he asked as soon as they were alone again. 

"It took my tinglies." 

"We have to leave," he said. "She's-"

"No," she said, and there was steady acceptance in it.

He clenched his jaw, eyes furious, but he took her in his arms and said no more. 

When he slept, she lay awake, thoughts spinning. She knew she could not win a fight against Death. No one could. Death was only toying with her, trying to wear her down, break her resolve and make her leave her be. She could not be bargained with, and she could not be won against. She was without mercy, but she was equally without cruelty. She simply was. And she would accept what she was handed. 

"Spike," she said urgently, "wake up. I need you to turn me."

He told her she was bonkers. He told her it could hardly matter to Death where she died, so they should go home and make a stand with the others. He told her she could damn well find some other method if she was determined to die here. He told her,  _ No _ .

She told him she would die here either way, but if he would help her then maybe this would not quite be the one-way trip she had anticipated. She wasn't going to start playing by the rules this late in the game, after all. 

He looked at her blue-cold lips and the gauntness of her cheeks, at the cut on her chin that wasn't healing. He told her she was a bitch.

And she knew he could be trusted to do it. She told him,  _ Sorry.  _ The word was too small.   
  


He stalled, of course, and though she fretted briefly about how long they had been gone, how things were going back home, she felt that they had fallen out of time, into time, to a place where things simply happened in the order they would. 

As she waited, Death went about her business - inscribing dead words with a razorblade pen that bled ink in heavy drops, twining barbed wire strings of dead music around a ghostly instrument. A shadowed leopard followed in her footsteps down one endless hallway, leaving large pug marks in the ash before they melted away as if they had never been; the slayer bowed her head to it as it passed, knowing it was the last of its kind. 

Spike feared Death as only the dead-and-deadly immortal can, the horror of her bleached bones and falling black feathers frequently stilling his tongue and baring the whites of his eyes. But to the slayer, she was an intimate, mother and sister and child at once, and the slayer had no fear, so she watched the rotations in patient calm, until the time came that the cold sunk deep enough to steal movement from her limbs. 

He wanted to stall further, maybe sneak her away ìn her weakened state, but her eyes were glazed with a shadow he himself suddenly knew with terrible intimacy, and he knew there was no hope here. So he did as she bid, and her blood flowed out hot and glowing and surging with life in that frozen dead place. And because he loved her (and he was a selfish git, really, afeared and alone and unable to let go), his blood flowed out too, and when her heart fluttered to stillness, he held his breath at the horror of what he had perpetrated, and what more could still be to come.   
  


When she arose all was silent and motionless in a way she'd never known, and he stared out of the window like a statue of misery. She said his name, but he would not face the ghastly thing he had done until she had said it thrice. Then he looked on her with dread, until she spoke, "I think I'm still me." There was puzzlement then, twin expressions of uncertainty. What happened when a slayer was turned? Or a living thing died unbidden? Neither knew.

She rose from the bed and went to display herself to Death. 

The outer room was cast in yellow, a vibrant living glow that emanated from a glass jar on the desk to light everything but the shadow seated behind it.

"You are a thing that should not be," Death said, in the voice of missing steel girders and worn brake cables. "I have not taken from you."

"I have given," Buffy said, and she held her breath. 

"I will accept," Death said. Her fingers reached across to the jar, and at her touch, the yellow light faded and shrank, until the darkness had returned and the jar stood empty. "It is done. Now leave this place."   
  


They staggered from the cave into a misty rain, minds befogged and grey-clouded. Gravel skittered beneath their feet and stones clattered down the slopes as they slid and stumbled away from that place, past the jagged peaks of obsidian, onto the grinding flakes of shale, moving again through the valleys of nightmare.

When the ground became open and level again she seemed to lose her way, and Spike took her hand to lead them for the light only he could sense. When they reached the sand at last, stars appeared in ones and twos, followed by a silvery moon and the evening desert. Buffy’s hair swung down to her shoulder blades, grown out a cold brown in their sunless travels; Spike’s was scruffy where he'd chewed and worried at it. They tasted the smoke of lost memories behind them, but they did not look back, new fears growing as they quickened their feet for home.

For a moment they could not see the town where it should be, and panic began to crawl in. Then the reflected light of it caught their eyes, and they saw that it had only sunk. 

The new slope down into town was sided by houses, shops, trees that looked decades old; they could not quite get their bearings, street names unfamiliar and landmarks changed. They stumbled across a park, a pond full of sleeping waterfowl; Spike was sure it was where his old crypt should be, that a picnic table marked the site of the cemetery gates, but this could not be correct. From there they found Revello Drive, and the nearer they came to 1630, the slower their feet moved. 

Although the trees outside were gone, the house was where it belonged, despite the street number on a new fence proclaiming otherwise. It had grown upwards, changed colour, gained new windows, but she would know it in any skin. She stepped onto the path that led to the front door, and Spike's hand jerked her to a stop. She looked back at him, and he shook his head, a look of painful trepidation on his face. 

"Buffy-" he started to say, but she refused to hear him, shaking off his hand and running to her door.

She knocked, loud, impatient, her frenetic desperation shaking the whole front wall. Footsteps sounded inside, and she gulped in a breath,  _ see, it was okay, they were still home, it had just been a little while. _ A stranger opened the door, and would not tell her where everyone was, said he did not know who everyone was, said he had lived here for twenty years and had never heard of these people and was she alright, did she need some help? And she tried to push past him, to find them herself, wherever they were hiding themselves-  
Then for the first time she experienced the barrier of a threshold, as her house rejected her uninvited vampiric energy and the empty air smashed her in the face. 

Spike dragged her away from there, apologising to the man, hurrying her out of sight and across town to where a forest stood, and she let him tug her along because nothing made sense. 

With the instinct for self-preservation that had carried him so far, he found them an old groundskeeper's shed amongst the trees, locked and abandoned, windowless and surrounded by heavy shade, and here they stayed for several days, creeping out at night to gather information and returning before the sun rose. They spun theories of alternate dimensions, dreamworlds, distortions; surely they had become lost on the way home, stepped through the wrong door. The hellmouth was silent, vampires nowhere to be seen; unable to find a single butcher's store, they hunted wild creatures in the woods. They found Xander and Anya’s names on one of the memorial walls that had replaced cemeteries, dated 2068 & 2069\. Finally they found a demon old enough to remember the turn of the millennium, and with her story, slowly, horribly, the truth sunk in. They were right where they should be.    
  


But it was 2105.

 

Eventually they tracked down what remained of the Watcher's Council, now watchers in literal over this more peaceful world. The delegation who came to Sunnyvale were grim-faced and at a loss for what to do with them; soon she realised they were embarrassed by these relics of times gone, by their aggression and their fear. Their undead status barely raised an eyebrow, and that only because their kind were now so rare; it was their history of warfare - rather than negotiation - that brought disapproving frowns. She began trying to explain -  _ you don't understand what this place was like…  _ \- but of course, they could not, so she closed her mouth. They were offered the stranger's home on Revello; Buffy shook her head. They were asked what names they would go by, suggesting they remove any public connection with their past; Spike’s was easy, but he insisted Buffy had already lost enough, given up enough, so after a brief debate she became simply ‘Buffy’, no middle, no last name, no title. They were given papers, identification, money held in trust thanks to a sister who had never quite stopped believing in the mythicness of them. And more precious than all, photos, letters, mementoes, a soft toy pig, a copy of Dawn’s PhD certificate. 

They took these things, and they discussed leaving, running from the memories. But this was the nearest they had left to home, and it was her duty to watch over it, even if everyone else had forgotten. So they stayed, and bought a house from which to do so.  


A few months later, the first familiar face they'd seen appeared on the doorstep, tilting his bowler hat and standing out in the sun until he was sure of his welcome. Whistler.

He told them what the council hadn't been able to: how the restoration of balance with her lifeforce given had snapped the First back like a rubber band, crumpling the underground armies at the hellmouth and its offshoots in a flood of cleansing water. How the stretch the other side had put on that elastic band before the end had seen it break back with brutal power, annihilating most of the world's vampires, harmonising energies beyond normality, sending the human population into an era of peaceful enlightenment not seen for millennia. They were right, it could not last forever, but they should enjoy it while it did. The Powers that Be were most pleased, and they had gifts to grant. 

"I can't give you back the sunshine," he told Buffy. "But I can take away the cold." She nodded, so he touched her chest, and warmth returned, flowing honey-sweet and languid through her dead veins. "And I can clean your whiskers." She nodded again, and the persistent feeling of oil-slick obscured senses melted away, and she felt again the familiar tingle on her neck that told her Spike was with her. 

"And what does Spike get?" she asked. "This is his victory too."

Whistler tut-tutted, then he looked at her face and sighed, then he placed their hands together and said, "You can share." And Spike felt warm too.   
  


They bought books of history, and watched movies, and wandered the town at night, trying to learn to navigate this world that wasn't theirs. Gradually it became less overwhelming, and the following year they were married, giving them legal bonds to someone at last. 

And so they lived in the dark in their home on the hill, and watched the people of Sunnyvale going about their lives in the sun and the night in safety, and utterly naive to the gift of it. And they didn’t mind, because they hadn't done it to be thanked, and because there were children who went on walks in the dark in safety, and their naivety was good and sweet. But they were sad that no one remembered their family, the brave people who'd stood beside them, who'd fought and argued and smiled and laughed and screwed up and made amends and loved. So they were thankful when they made a friend and he wrote a book about them.

  
  


*

  
  


Benji put the last inky page down on the table, and stared at the wall. 

 

He poured himself a drink, and stared at the bench.

 

He took out Buffy-Anne's book, and stared at the cover.

 

He had a chilling feeling that the book he was holding was the fiction. 

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And now I can say: this fic is my take on Richard Adams' "E-ahrairah and the Black Rabbit of Inle". So all praise and credit to him, and if you haven't read Watership Down, I highly recommend it 💙


	7. Perceptions

 

 

He went back and forth all day. It was implausible. Impossible. Inconceivable. Vampires simply did not exist. 

 

And yet.

 

There was that vague memory of Buffy catching his fall without expending the slightest bit of effort; there was William's hand moving with inhuman speed to save the whisky. For that matter, there was the amount of whisky he'd seen them consume.

 

There was the way they'd appeared the night Lily hurt her finger, and the way they'd vanished. 

 

The sense of menace, threat, hard-won strength, utterly alien to his experience. 

 

The old horror stories that had sprung to mind.

 

The prickle of  _ Danger!  _ that had sent adrenaline coursing through him when he'd unknowingly upset them. 

 

The accents, the archaic (and the plain unusual) phrases. 

 

William's honest amusement at his musings on life in 1900.

 

The way they watched him,  _ read _ him, sometimes seemed to model their responses off of him. Forget cultural differences; they seemed from a different world.  __

 

Impossible, yet the cold truth of it sat unmoved in his gut every time he tried to rationalise it away. His friends were vampires. The heroes of a secret and forgotten war. Lost in time. Preternatural. Had they red eyes in the dark and dripping fangs? Could they turn into bats, wolves, smoke; were they watching him right now? He chastised himself for this ridiculous flight of fancy, even as his eyes flicked and twitched at shadows in the corners. 

 

He had to know. Had to put a stop to this ridiculous imagining, this caveman fear of things lurking beyond the firelight. Had to show them he was unafraid, that they should fear him should they frighten Lily- they would not hurt her, surely? With teeth, or with deranged stories? No, no, they were her friends; if they were undead then they were warriors for good, if they were slightly insane then they'd only shown it because he'd pushed and nagged them into it. He'd asked for their dark story; he just hadn't been prepared for this.

 

He opened his front door. The midday sun of another perfect California day beamed down on the green-spotted city spread out below; blue sky, reflective glass windows, shifting spots of yellow light falling through the trees in his yard.  _ Ordinary.  _

 

Next door the redwoods obscured most of the house, and cast the path to the door in deep shade. He shivered reflexively; shuffled his feet. If he  _ knew _ now, perhaps he was a threat. Should he take a weapon, a defence, just in case they thought to frighten him? He didn't know where he'd begin to find one - if a bible would work perhaps? Didn't own one, in any case.  _ Close the door again, see what you have.  _

 

Upstairs he dug through the back of the wardrobe for the shoebox of things his grandfather had left him ( _ did their mementoes fit inside a shoebox too? Shove that thought aside).  _ In the bottom of the box he found the silver cross that had dangled from the rearview mirror of his grandfather's cars for as long as he remembered, and fingered it in a brief flash of nostalgia before slipping it into his pocket ( _ was it real silver? Did that matter?) _ . 

 

Ready then, for what he had been unprepared for. Back to the front door and down the drive before he could reconsider that thought.

 

William opened the door, and here was that sense of lethal power again, the coiled muscles and waiting teeth; had it faded away over the months, or had he stopped noticing, let it slip from attention through familiarity, the constant environ becoming his new degree of normality?

 

As he stood there stupidly, William stepped to the side and in a clear and level tone said, "Come in." 

 

He realised then that they'd never verbally asked him to, for all the times he'd been inside. "Thank you," he mumbled.

 

William closed the door behind him. It was solid, old wood and heavy iron catches, and even softly shut it had a sense of finality to it, of being committed. In the dim hallway his mind presented images of tombs, mausoleums, dead things underground- Buffy’s little hands with the skin stripped from her knuckles after fighting her way from her coffin.

 

"You're over early," William said as he put on the kettle. 

 

"Yes," Benji said. "I… hope I didn't wake you."

 

William shook his head. "Stormcloud's about to kid. Buffy’s out there keeping an eye on her." He seemed about to say something else, then redirected to grabbing mugs and the coffee jar. Waiting for the water to boil, his eyes drifted to the window, to the barn, and he seemed to listen intently to something beyond the bubbling of the kettle. 

 

"I'm sorry," Benji said, "perhaps I should come back another time."

 

"No. Now's good. She'll be a while yet." He placed mugs on the kitchen table, took a seat, watched as Benji sat opposite. 

 

William who had fought demons, hellbeasts, himself? Who lived in the dark and drank- oh god, the goats. They drank from the goats. William whose face was now inscrutable, closed off, posture wary, possibly expecting Benji to do something violent with hands or words- waiting for harsh words and hoping to shield them from his wife? 

 

The cross in his pocket became one with the cold stone in his stomach, heavy, too heavy, a stabbing ice pick thing that marked him, stained him as the traitor he was; he'd been given trust by these people who had given so much for his bright shiny world, and to the face of their honesty he'd slapped prejudice and refusal. His stomach turned to writhing eels in a churning winter stream, tumbled and bashed about in confusion and bruising shame, and he thought suddenly that he should leave, apologise, say what exactly? Pretend he did not know, forget, return to comfortable ignorance; no, that was wrong, all of this was wrong, he owed them something almost unfathomable, a debt for his bright shiny world, and he knew now, the certainty of truth in his bones now somehow.

 

"I'm so sorry," he said, for the cross, for their loss, for the prejudice and the pain, for the long-gone cheerleader's uniform and the onion blossoms at the Bronze, because he got it now, at last: it was all true (though the gang, the drugs, were metaphor), the way Buffy-Anne- nay,  _ Buffy, _ had danced and Spike had sat on a porch step, all of it was as true - more true - than the watcher's dry accounts of the slayer's battles. 

 

William (Spike? What should he call him?) shook his head, eyes darkening. "We don't want your pity." 

 

No, of course not, to give it was to imply regrets. Benji had one though, burning ice on his thigh and making him shift in his seat to try and distance himself from it. 

 

Those dark eyes fixed him suddenly in place, the sound of his own heartbeat throbbing faintly in his ears as he faced this utter stillness of William now, not a whisper of breath or a flicker of pulse beneath the man's marble skin. "Do you want to see?" William purred, in the velvety seduction of a moonless midnight sky. How many people must have let themselves fall into it, as he did now?

 

"Yes."

 

William held out his hand. "Give it to me."

 

Shamefully, he dug into his pocket and took out the silver cross, dropping it into William's waiting palm.

 

Smoke rose, white and misty, and his eyes jumped from the searing skin to William's unmoved face still watching his own. He snatched the cross back, heartbeat pounding louder. "Fuck. Sorry," he said quickly, leaning away with it.

 

William held his palm up, showing the seared skin in the two places the cross had made contact, black and red.

 

"Christ," Benji murmured, then blushed at the irony. "It doesn't- you don't feel it?"

 

"Oh yeah, hurts like a bitch," William said, flexing his fingers. 

 

"I'm sorry," he said again. "I should never have brought-"

 

"Nah. Good to know some people have still got an ounce of self-preservation instinct in them." He watched Benji's fluster as he tried to work out what to do with the cross before finally putting it down on the far edge of the table. Then, " _ Watch _ ," William murmured in that same tone of seductive promise. 

 

Benji watched, and with a soft crunch of bone, William's face  _ changed _ . Brow ridges slanted and drew down into something feral and fierce, wrinkling over his nose; eyes narrowed and turned a hard - and somehow cold - yellow-gold. Lips were drawn back to reveal gleaming fangs, sharpened teeth. He was a snarling tiger, a wild hunting cat, and as Benji stared, open-mouthed, he smirked that oh-so-familiar smug grin on his demonic face. Then with a slow blink, he melted back into his human guise.

 

"You show-off," Buffy’s voice said weakly from the other side of the room, startling Benji; he hadn't heard her come in. She crossed to the table and flicked William's burnt hand with her finger, shooting him a soft glare. He pulled her onto his lap, catching her flicking fingers in his hand and folding them inside it.

 

"Um," said Benji. 

 

They watched him, behind barricades, in a silence of challenge. A line drawn and marked,  _ this is who and what we are, and we will not apologise. _

 

"Are you okay?" he said, then felt ridiculous; it was five years gone since they'd stumbled back here and needed those words, and they were, after all, the same people who'd danced joyfully in his living room the other night. The missing pages jammed in awkwardly between then and now had thrown things for a loop, muddling his perceptions of what happened when and-  _ god, how confusing it must have been for them. _ But they were smiling a little now, defensiveness beginning to ease with his response; right, yes, he could do this. "How's… Stormcloud?" he asked. 

 

"Getting close," Buffy said, standing. "They don't usually need any help, but we like to keep watch just in case." She laid claim to the rest of William's coffee, taking a sip then curling it possessively to her chest.

 

William stood too, asking Benji, "Coming?"

 

"Would- would that be alright?" he asked. "I won't frighten her or anything? I'm afraid I don't know them as well as Lily does." The offer was intriguing; he'd never seen an animal born in real life. 

 

"Be fine," William said. "Not squeamish or anything though are you?"

 

"I don’t think so. I mean, I've seen documentaries…"

  
  


Documentaries were nothing like the reality of it. They sat across the barn from the stall, and Stormcloud paid them no heed as she shuffled and snuffled and kicked uncomfortably, her furry belly tightening for long seconds in a steadily increasing rhythm. Soon she lay down in the hay, shifted, panted, began to strain with each tightening, and then  _ feet  _ emerged, tiny hooves encased in a slippery greyish caul, and Benji was transfixed, astounded, astonished. The rest of the kid emerged swiftly, then it was twitching weakly on the hay, caul torn and slipping away to reveal saturated orange fur, and he was frightened for it, flat and bedraggled as it was, all knobbly knuckle parts and impossibly small nostrils coated in slimy liquid. He stood up, alarmed, though what he thought to do he had no idea, but Buffy touched his arm to still him, and as he watched Stormcloud bent around and began to clean the kid, clearing the tiny nostrils and up its face as it gasped and floundered like a landed fish. Then it was wriggling and wobbling about, lungs picking up steam and little cries coming from it. Stormcloud made strange sounds, purry and soft, and then strained again to release the placenta, red and throbbing and turning his stomach but he couldn't look away. 

 

The goatling worked itself to sitting, sprawling on its belly with oversized legs going every which way and head wobbling atop its long neck, then began edging nearer to its mother as she knocked it this way and that with her long tongue. Buffy stepped into the pen quietly and felt along the doe's stomach, probing and prodding; Stormcloud ignored her, seemingly transfixed by her kid. 

 

"No more," Buffy said softly, coming back to them. 

 

William nodded and linked his fingers through hers. "Now, you look like you need a drink," he said to Benji.

 

"Yes. Yes, I think I would like that very much," he said.

  
  


They toasted Stormcloud's baby, then anything else they could think of. "No wonder I could never out-drink you," he said suddenly. "The competition was rigged against me, you unfair bastards."

 

They laughed, unrepentant, and he joined them in it.

 

Questions began jabbing, bubbling, multiplying like rabbits, and, when they didn’t take offence to the first tentative forays, poured out of him by the bucket load. There'd been demons here; were there still? What was left of that lost hidden world? 

 

There were many, she said, but peaceful types. Some that hadn’t always been that way, gone strange for the last century, and maybe falling into new patterns of nature because of it. 

 

"Evolving, like," William said. "Generations come and go, things are forgotten. Peace suits them too."

 

It wouldn't last, she repeated, as Whistler had. People were people, and it would be them - humans - she was certain, who would flip the balance again eventually. It was the humanity of vampires that made them so dangerous, after all. 

 

Vampires. It clicked, echoing in his glass. What had happened to Angel? The sunny porch and the yellow dog?

 

William sneered, expression muddling bitter complaint and unwanted regret, then answered in a rant against the Powers that Bloody Suck. Thrown by Buffy’s latest success in running roughshod over their careful planning, they'd wrung their hands in confusion, then Angel had woken up (on the Alaskan baby hellmouth he'd been stationed at before the quake) and found himself with a pulse. He'd been cremated forty years by the time they learnt of it, but they weren't sure he wouldn't still crawl back one day when the Powers decided it was time to play again. 

 

Drusilla was still out there, princess to an entourage of blood-donating humans; she'd visited early on, and Buffy had been conflicted by the:  _ familiar face! _ (even if it was that ho-bag of an ex), the  _ evil vampire! _ (with a side of possessiveness for her husband), and Dru's  _ 'Sunshiny little grandspawn'  _ greeting. Dru had swooped out again before the night was over, and they had said that letting things lie was best; they were wary of upsetting the balance further by actively seeking to end what evil still remained. Rubber band effect and all. 

 

And what should he call William? Buffy had already reverted to 'Spike', and the note of caution their tongues had always moved with was vanishing as they finally relaxed into their true skins in his company. Language flew faster; cultural reference puzzles he was eager to learn, peculiar inside-out phrases from Buffy that made William snicker, words he'd only heard in old books - perhaps they were keeping these from Death's dictionary of extinction. 

 

Either name was fine, William/Spike said, but Benji resolved to train himself to use Spike at least on occasion. 

 

The photos! He asked cautiously, and she revealed: the back porch steps again, only this time unedited - it was a picture of Buffy and Spike that Dawn was holding, standing in a kitchen, surrounded by girls. 

 

"I think it’s the only footage they had of us both," Buffy said. "Somehow we weren't concerning ourselves with taking photos."

 

"I'm sorry,  _ footage?"  _ he asked, ears pricking eagerly again. 

 

"Yes. I gave him so much shit about it, but Andrew was right. It's important. He made sure the council held it on file."

 

They relocated to the living room. Buffy and William squashed into a lounge chair together, leaving him to take the couch, then the wallscreen lit up with a fuzzy low-res image and he watched in amazement as Andrew Wells narrated yet-another-version of the myth of Buffy & Spike. They were all there, being interviewed, filmed surreptitiously in between, arguing and laughing and speechifying and planning, and when it was finished he sat forward, staring at the blank screen as if it would provide more if he only asked it right.

 

Then their own questions began to unstick - what was it like to grow up here, in this safe town? To develop without set gender roles? To always have had the world in your pocket on your pc, to never be out of instant contact with anyone? And why the fuck did they have to go and ban tobacco?

 

His everyday life experience was as alien as their own, he now saw, and over the following months he did his best to tell his truths to them in turn, reevaluating them for himself along the way - his axis had tilted, and everything had changed. Things he'd always taken for granted became wondrous marvels; things he'd thought to be of great import became insignificant trifles. What did it matter if his car broke down, when he could walk back to his secure home in the warm sunshine? He was drunk on life in the 22nd century, dazzled blind after time spent in a shadowy living room. He took Lily to the beach one Saturday, and when she didn't want to go home at dusk, they bought takeaways and sat eating on the dark sand, watching the waves glitter with starlight; he asked himself why they'd never done this before. 

  
  


For Christmas Lily got her own goat - the latest kid - and a pretty collar for it to wear in the herd; she named her  _ Tenpinamarlow,  _ and wrote him a list of instructions for providing her with extra treats when she went to her grandparents for the end of the month. Handovers at their house had been difficult for a long time, but somewhere in the mingle of seasonal spirit and his own reborn outlook the usual bad taste never arose in his mouth and he wished them both a hearty  _ Merry Christmas!  _ at the door. Cue flummoxed faces and a hasty stammer to respond appropriately; they were all adults, after all, and this tension was ridiculous when they all wanted the same thing. 

  
  


He dragged Buffy and Spike to the annual New Year's open-air concert in the desert beyond town - after being assured he wouldn't accidentally stumble into their valley of Death out there, of course. By the time of the countdown they were lounging on the hood of his car passing a bottle back and forth; Buffy leapt up and lit a handful of sparklers, passing them out. At zero Spike made a lunge for her; she dodged smoothly, impossibly fast, then laughed out,  _ Catch me _ , and raced off into the sand and scrub, a firefly trailing sparks of living gold into the distance. Spike sprung off after her with a bark of eager laughter, chasing with wild abandon until they were far out of sight. Benji chuckled and lay back to watch the stars. 

By the time they returned (sheepish and rumpled), he had an empty bottle and epiphany to share:

 

He'd had it backwards again - they didn't live in the dark; they were perhaps the only people able to sense the sunshine of this enlightened place, this world that was not their own and yet by rights belonged to them. If they were at times haunted, afraid, grave with a lonely aching beyond his bearing, then at others that was eclipsed by an all-consuming love and laughter and joy in the world and in each other that was the most beyond-human thing about them. They understood the cost of peaceful lives; they'd paid the price. And this let them own theirs wholly, seeing the brightness no one else could for the contrast provided by the shadows they never forgot. He loved them, loved them like he loved the sun, these sparkly glowing midnight creatures who had opened his eyes to something dark and shone their fangs at it in retaliation, who had given him the contrast needed to perceive the light.

 

They laughed, and told him he was drunk, then Buffy picked him up and put him in the car to be driven home.

  
  


He thought he might write another story. It was there, teasing and nudging at him, whispering in his ear, a ribbony thread about people lost and the things they blessed the world with before they left - things that were far too wonderful, surely, to be fair reward for the pain, but given all the same, and pain dulling away into appreciating the time before and after with warmth and thanks. Perhaps he would dedicate it to Caroline, so she wouldn't be forgotten.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much everyone who's read :)  
> Please drop a comment and let me know what you thought, feedback feeds the muse!


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